Word: yuri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Four years ago Soviet Director Yuri Lyubimov opened an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in London. Authorities in Moscow paid less attention to the rave reviews than to a London Times interview in which Lyubimov castigated Soviet censors for persistent interference with his work back home. Of 40 shows he had mounted, seven had been banned and many others had been rewritten or restaged. Said Lyubimov: "I am 65 years old, and I simply don't have the time to wait until these government officials finally arrive at an understanding of a culture that will be worthy...
...glasnost policy opened prison doors too. In an apparent attempt to patch up the Soviet Union's poor human rights record, Gorbachev allowed such prominent dissidents as Anatoli Shcharansky and Yuri Orlov to leave the country. And just before Christmas the leading lights of the dissident movement, Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner, were permitted to return to Moscow from internal exile in Gorky...
...officials were disturbed by Sakharov's bold behavior, they did not show their concern. Indeed, Soviet authorities went out of their way to signal a truce with the country's leading human rights activist. When asked at a press conference if Sakharov might be punished for his Afghanistan comment, Yuri Kashlev, a senior Soviet Foreign Ministry official, responded mildly, "I do not see anything bad in this comment by Sakharov. Indeed, our leadership has stated in the past on many occasions that we seek to resolve the problem of Afghanistan as soon as possible." As if to reinforce that point...
...gain such cooperation from Sakharov the physicist, Gorbachev will have to woo Sakharov the human rights activist. The courtship may already have begun. On Dec. 19, Crimean Tatar Activist Mustafa Dzhemilev was freed from a Siberian labor camp after twelve years of prison and exile. Last week Yuri Lyubimov, a prominent Soviet theatrical director who was stripped of his citizenship two years ago for criticizing cultural restrictions, received a phone call in Washington from a former colleague at Moscow's Taganka Theater encouraging him to return home. Lyubimov believes the call was officially sanctioned, and is pursuing the overture...
...other activists and dissidents remain in prison, internal exile or psychiatric hospitals, to be sure, but none as famous as Sakharov and Bonner. Over the past year, Gorbachev has tried to reverse the Soviet Union's negative human-rights image by releasing two well-known activists, Anatoli Shcharansky and Yuri Orlov. Another, Anatoli Marchenko, 48, died in prison in early December, the victim of a brain hemorrhage following a hunger strike. His death may have induced the Kremlin to make a gesture of reconciliation and at the same time rid itself of the burden of the Sakharovs' incarceration...