Word: without
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show is redeemed by the wit and humanity...
...dictator's toxic phantom pervades the book, which is the literary incarnation of Sinyavsky's public and private life. He admits that in 1948 he was asked by agents of the KGB to woo a fellow student, the daughter of a French naval attache. He complied without knowing their purpose or even the extent of his own motives. Years later, Sinyavsky put the intrigue to good use by enlisting the Frenchwoman to help smuggle his writings to the West...
...politics of image and empty rhetoric. He equates Ronald Reagan's feeble explanations of the Iran arms-for-hostages deal with the answers of parents whose fogginess hides an implied threat: "If you want to remain a child, if you want to enjoy the privilege of life without fear, do not judge...
...comfortable that the Kremlin could indefinitely ignore the East European-like rush to multiparty politics. Boris Yeltsin, the ex-Politburo member turned radical populist, urged the leadership to learn the lessons of East Germany, where reforms were delayed so long that they were eventually accomplished within a week -- "without ((Erich)) Honecker...
Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...