Word: yuri
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Launched nearly four years ago, the bulbous, beetle-shaped ship was the latest in a series named in "salute" to a Soviet folk hero, the late Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. Though weighing only about a quarter as much as Skylab, which came tumbling ignominiously back to earth in 1979, Salyut was durable and highly innovative in design. Among its technological features were two docking ports (to receive visiting spacecraft, including a new class of fully automated, unmanned supply ship) and large, winglike solar panels (to convert sunlight into electricity). Salyut carried myriad scientific and observational gear, notably...
...first time in six years that Americans had been in space, and it came 20 years to the day after Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight. But for Columbia's commander, John Young, 50, it was old hat. During the fiery, jolting liftoff, his pulse hardly climbed above 85 beats a minute; this was, after all, Young's fifth such journey, the most by any American astronaut. Allowed Young: "It shook a little sharper. The vibration was more than what we experienced in the simulator." But the rookie Crippen could barely contain his excitement...
...DIED. Yuri Trifonov, 55, Soviet writer who plumbed the moral dilemmas of Soviet life in such subtle, allusive works as The House on the Embankment (1976), The Long Goodbye (1971) and The Exchange (1969); of a heart attack following a kidney operation; in Moscow. Trifonov, whose father, a high Bolshevik official, was imprisoned and executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and whose mother was sent to a prison camp, once explained: "A lot of things can be said best through art, through metaphor...
Rubentstein documents how the freedom of expressions came to be the first and foremost human rights. The publication of literary works abroad brought seven years of labor for Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyaksy in 1965, prompting the first public demonstrations for human rights in Soviet history. Such actions then continued; in 1966 a literary work was used for the first time as evidence in court against its writer; in 1968 the first person was arrested for distributing letters in defense of prisoners of conscience, in 1972 the first attempt was made to discredit the movement rather than individual remarks...
...times, Rubenstein's book becomes a court calendar where we watch dissidents held in pretrial retaining centers for over a year without contact with relatives, where they are tried without defense witnesses, closed courtrooms, without cross-examinations, sometimes with the judge leaving the room (case of Yuri Orlov) or with no trial whatsoever (Andrei Sakharov). What Rubenstein reveals is that in the Soviet Union, abuses of human rights are not isolated incidents. There are day-to-day harassment, searches, interrogations, interference with phones, psychological confinement, separation of families, inhuman treatment of prisoners. Often the regime is purposely inconsistent creating...