Word: volga
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...policeman. Until his political appointment to the KGB in 1967, Andropov's career had been in government or party service. The son of a railway worker, he was born in 1914 in the village of Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus. At times a telegraph operator and boatman on the Volga River, Andropov began his political career at 22, when he became an organizer for the Young Communist League. After serving as a political commissar on the Finnish front during World War II, he worked in a series of party jobs, gradually gaining a reputation as an expert on Eastern Europe...
Andropov's daughter Irina is married to Actor Alexander Filipov, who has performed in a number of avant-garde productions at Moscow's Taganka Theater. It is through Filipov that Russian artists and theater people have sometimes caught a glimpse of the unofficial Andropov. At theater parties, the former Volga boatman likes to join in hearty renditions of Russian songs. Andropov also has a dry sense of humor. One Moscow actor who chanced to be seated across a dinner table from Andropov related how the then secret-police chief reached across, the table to offer him a glass of cognac...
...funeral, no serious Kremlinologist was surprised. The signs had been pointing that way for three years, ever since a loan Andropov had applied for to buy the apartment next to Brezhnev's had been approved Since then, Andropov's bosses had granted his request for a brand new Volga sedan. And they had even given him a full extra week's paid vacation that his hadn't asked...
...your review "Blood Relatives" [Aug. 9] you say that our brother Alexander Pasternak was a member of Stalin's secret police, the Cheka. As an architect who designed one lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Alexander was employed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1936. The NKVD not only controlled all construction projects, like the canal and the metro, but had also taken over the functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more...
...scene is Kuibyshev, a Russian industrial city on the Volga. Enter stage left the Soviet version of Gogol's greedy Inspector General. The inspector is put up in a luxurious little hotel on the picturesque banks of the Volga, especially built for the pleasure of inspectors and other snoopy officials from Moscow. It stands in a gracious park surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence and guarded by burly professional wrestlers. The hotel staff includes a cook who serves up the local delicacy, sterlet fish from the Volga, and a team of maids who provide sex. The high point...