Word: smolensk
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...Date of the Crime. The Katyn (rhymes with sateen) massacre was first reported by the Nazis in April 1943. On a spruce-covered hill overlooking the Dnieper, near Smolensk, Russia, they had found, stacked in mass graves, the bodies of some 4,000 Polish officers. Each was bound with hands behind his back; each had been shot through the base of the skull. The Nazis charged that the Russians had done it. The Polish officers, they said, were those captured by the Russians when they invaded Poland in September 1939. The Russians had shipped them from various prison camps...
...charge was made at a time when anything the Nazis said was deeply and properly distrusted. The Russians promptly countercharged that the Nazis had done it. The Russian story: when the Red armies retreated from Smolensk, they had to leave behind the captive Polish officers. The Nazis had shot the Poles, rigged the Katyn story as a propaganda plant...
Zadkine's father was a riverboat builder in the Russian city of Smolensk, and the sculptor's ambition has always been to make his works "as beautiful and perfect as a well-built boat." That simile would never have occurred to classical sculptors, who took the human body as their measure of perfection. It partly explained the mixture of respect for his materials, trim severity and bargelike bluntness in Zadkine...
...male ghost, rising on tiptoe to speak over his wife's shoulder (he also had a bullet hole in his forehead), "I am Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, Siberia and Georgia, Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia and Bialystok, Lord of Pskov, Riazan, Yaroslavl, Vitebsk and All the Region of the North, Lord...
...male ghost, rising on tiptoe to speak over his wife's shoulder (he also had a bullet hole in his forehead), "I am Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Novgorod, Kazan, Astrakhan, of Poland, Siberia and Georgia, Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Podolia and Finland, Prince of Estonia, Livonia and Bialystok...