Word: volga
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...Freidenberg's diary, which Editor Mossman has used to illuminate the letters, we also learn that Pasternak's brother Alexander was a member of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, during the Great Purge. An architect, Alexander helped design and supervise the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was built by slave labor in 1936. According to the diary, when Alexander was slated to receive a medal from Soviet Chairman Mikhail Kalinin for his work on the canal, Cousin Sasha on the eve of his arrest pleaded with the Chekist to try to save his wife...
...long ago as 1830, a czarist surveyor named Alexander Shrenk suggested a way of easing this imbalance by diverting the northerly-flowing Pechora River into the Volga, the great river that sustains much of southern Russia. But even in the 1930s, the Stalinist heyday of dam building and hydroelectric construction, the scheme was considered no more than a mammoth pipedream...
Grandiose may be an understatement. The enterprise involves two separate sets of river diversions. On the European side of the Urals, the volume of the Volga would be increased by funneling into it the flow of three major northern rivers, the Onega, the Northern Dvina and the Pechora. Officially sanctioned by President Leonid Brezhnev in his speech on agricultural goals two weeks ago, the European grand scheme is scheduled to be launched next year. The rerouting would require the building of 25 dams and numerous pumping stations. As the barriers go up, they would raise river levels a section...
...railway worker from the northern Caucasus, Andropov was a telegraph operator and Volga boatman before he joined the Young Communist League. He served as political commissar on the Finnish front during World War II and eventually joined the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, rising rapidly to the rank of ambassador. While Ambassador to Budapest in 1956, he helped supervise the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising. Though not previously a professional secret policeman, Andropov was named top cop of the Soviet Union in 1967. He quickly became known for the efficiency with which he repressed all forms of political, religious...
...delegation, the ninth to visit Hanoi since the war ended almost seven years ago, was headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage. The group was greeted at the airport by a line of smiling Vietnamese officials, then loaded into several black Volga sedans. As they rode toward the capital, the Americans noticed that much of the countryside had the appearance of a nation on military alert; antiaircraft guns loomed over bomb craters, and camouflaged radar antennae poked their way out of thatch-roofed huts...