Unusual news is arriving from the former Soviet Union: leading democrats such as Yuri Afanasyev, Yelena Bonner, and many others are publicly protesting against the management of Radio Liberty. The immediate cause of their protest is Radio Liberty’s decision to drop one of its most popular programs, “In the Country and in the World,” whose...
Viktor Trostnikov, a scientist and philosopher from Moscow, recently paid a visit to Washington, DC. A decade ago he was fired from his job as professor of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineering, for participation in the almanac Metropol, and he currently earns a living as a mason. He is the author...
A new word, “hazing,” has washed onto the pages of the Soviet press with the wave of glasnost. It denotes the harassment, oppression, and humiliation suffered by new conscripts, “greenhorns,” at the hands of “grandfathers”—the Soviet term for soldiers who are nearing the end of their conscription term. The subject was broached by Yuri Polyakov...
A new anti-alcohol campaign has been launched in the USSR on two fronts—one of administrative imposition of measures, sometimes very severe, and one of ideological justification for those measures. This twofold approach is fully understandable because the Soviet system is based on ideological dogmaticism, and any political or social campaign, as well as any important...
“Without the spiritual rebirth no political changes will make people free. But the spiritual rebirth, a Christian rebirth, is the ascent of a free man, and not of Russian nationalism, the cult of homeland, fatherland, and one’s country.” -Mihajlo Mihajlov in “Some Timely Thoughts” (written in 1974 in response to Letter to the Soviet...