Word: yuri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Countless espionage thrillers and spy movies have celebrated its exploits to Soviet citizens. Officers of the organization are regularly awarded the country's highest decorations, and their chief, Yuri Andropov, 66, is a member of the ruling Politburo. Andropov himself has said that a typical member of his agency is "a man of pure honesty and enormous personal courage, implacable in the struggle against enemies, stern in the name of duty, humane and prepared to sacrifice himself for the people's cause." The object of this official adulation is the Committee for State Security-acronym...
...most other countries, success in the Soviet Union can depend on family and personal connections. With the right contacts, one has a lot less trouble getting into a top school, landing a good job and winning advancement. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev's elder son Yuri, for example, was named First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade last year at the relatively tender age of 47. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's son Anatoli, 48, was appointed director of the African Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1976. Influence peddling-called blat in Russian-prevails at all levels...
...over the past two weeks have arrested four prominent dissidents and searched the homes of several others. The moves mean a further thinning of Soviet dissident ranks already greatly diminished by the deportation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Amalrik in the mid-1970s and the trials and imprisonment of Yuri Orlov and Anatoli Shcharansky, among others, in 1978. The movement's sole internationally known survivor is Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who last week condemned the new arrests as "a calculated blow by the organs of repression...
Obviously, political reliability was as important as artistic talent. As the Bolshoi doggedly continued its tour to Chicago and Los Angeles, Artistic Director Yuri Grigorovich settled on a little-known principal to substitute for Godunov Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. For Grigorovich, the choice proved a disastrous mistake. Leonid Kozlov was intent on playing Godunov's role to the hilt. Following the troupe's last American curtain call in Los Angeles last week, Kozlov repeated Godunov's final grand jete to freedom...
...nothing less (don't laugh) than a space elevator. First conceived by a Leningrad engineer, Yuri Artsutanov in 1960, it was reinvented by a group of American scientists a decade later. There is no doubt that in theory at least it would work...