Word: metropole
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fyodorov has been in the food-service business since 1964, starting as a busboy and working his way up to become director at the Metropol, one of Moscow's leading hotels. He dreamed of having his own restaurant for 15 years. "But until Gorbachev came along," he says, "it wasn't possible." Fyodorov surveys the restaurant with a happy, proprietary air. The chef is at the bar discussing the day's menu with a waiter. A waitress is arranging the silverware. The line outside is growing longer. Fyodorov smiles and says, "This is perestroika...
...Soviet Writers' Union," Aksyonov ironically observes. A member of the official union for 18 years and the U.S.S.R.'s most popular living novelist, Aksyonov was pressured to leave the country when he edited an anthology of unorthodox Russian writing that the union deemed subversive. The collection, entitled Metropol, which includes an excerpt of a comic play by Aksyonov, was published in the U.S. by W.W.Norton...
...past two years, however, the authorities have systematically expunged Aksyonov's name from the annals of contemporary Russian letters. The reasons were not hard to find. In addition to his writing, he had been attempting to challenge Soviet censorship. His anthology of unorthodox Russian writing, Metropol, was denounced in the Soviet press as salacious and subversive. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, began to hound him in an effort to drive him into exile. In 1980, Aksyonov and his wife Maya succumbed to pressure and left the Soviet Union. His citizenship was then taken away by the Supreme Soviet...