Word: vodka
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STALIN'S DINNERS IN THE KREMLIN went on all night. he would sit at a long table and force his ministers and cronies to drink, hour after hour, while he plotted and probed and flattered and terrified them. At dawn, when their brains were numb with fear and vodka and confusion, the NKVD might lead one or two of the men away, without explanation, to be shot. That was the physics of paranoia under laboratory conditions: for every action, an opposite (if, in the Kremlin, somewhat unequal) reaction. Paranoia induces paranoia. Stalin refracted violent fear through alcohol, then presided over...
...vintage cricket paddles. A new favorite of Jan's dad, who's very particular when it comes to comfort, is our hand-rubbed rhino-skin Royal Bengalese Club Chair. Sink into this overstuffed beauty, and try not to imagine yourself in the highest echelons of the Raj, ordering a vodka tonic or dispatching 1,000 Gurkhas to certain death in the Khyber Pass...
...fierce energy of passive aggression drives--and explains--adolescence; in its grandiose moments it pulverizes empires. In the Soviet Union hundreds of millions of passive aggressives created a vast, vodka-soaked culture of subversive inefficiency, sly refusal and covert nonproduction that ultimately brought down the stolid slab of Marxism-Leninism...
...sophisticated, hi-fidelity stereotypes--are introduced, are belittled, and then skillfully revealed as vivid characters. We can see this in Sabbath's sexual escapades, which have a touch of the anthropological about them. Sabbath is shame-less enough to offer a girl in a detox clinic two quarts of vodka in return for sexual favors (while, mind you, he is ostensibly visiting his wrecked second wife drying up in said clinic), he is sharp enough to describe both his target and his wife with a commited, if not exactly compassionate, eye. This unblinking veracity is the source of Roth...
...different approach to life. We drink more vodka, we appreciate music more, and we enjoy life more." --Berlin cafe owner and Russian emigre Lucinka Wichmann on the cultural differences between Germans and Russians...