Word: mikhail
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...Mikhail Zaitsev made a beautiful corpse. Propped in the coffin he had carved and painted himself, he wore his Sunday suit and an expression of noble serenity. Then, when the village photographer had finished taking his picture, Zaitsev leaped out and helped his neighbors down the generous supplies of vodka and cold cuts he had laid in for the wake. Next day, the neighbors mailed the funeral picture to his estranged wife in another village, explaining that Comrade Zaitsev had been electrocuted by a high-tension wire...
Then, in 1959, the cold war thawed a bit, and along came Mikhail Alekseevich Menshikov. Urbane and nattily dressed, "Smiling Mike" impressed and puzzled Washington with his molar-showing cordiality. Menshikov was all smiles until the U-2 dustup. Then the Russian Ambassador simply vanished from the Washington scene for a while. After the Kennedy in auguration he reappeared, smiling as usual, but in recent months his grin seemed to be wearing thin...
...Kremlin equivalent of a third-class funeral, the body was buried behind the Mausoleum in a cemetery reserved for faintly dubious or dimly famous Red heroes-the folksy ex-President of Russia, Mikhail Kalinin, the ardent Stalinist Andrei Zhdanov, the founder of the secret police. Felix Dzerzhinsky, and U.S. Comrade John Reed. Capping the whole macabre comedy, a vase with twelve white chrysanthemums was placed on the new grave of the man who had just been certified over and over again as a mass murderer...
Beat Keats. In a whimsical but nonetheless pointed peroration, famed Cossack Novelist Mikhail (And Quiet Flows the Don) Sholokhov wryly contrasted the obscure existence led by talented young poets in the provinces with the "triumphs of our currently fashionable boudoir poets." Neatly exploiting peasant resentment of city slickers, Sholokhov blamed the "backwardness" of Red letters on the fact that the great majority of writers live in big cities, thus have "only superficial knowledge of quickly flowing and changing reality." In their "impossibly narrow trousers and absurdly broad-shouldered jackets," he scoffed, they are interested only in showing...
...types of Communists came to listen: comrades from small Russian villages, café-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia. Eager crowds awaited such stalwarts as Viet Minh's Ho Chi Minh and Red China's Chou Enlai, Astronaut Gherman Titov, Lieut. Colonel Mikhail Voronov (billed as "the man who shot down the U-2") was there, and so, imprisoned in a vast new bust that stared across Sverdlov Square, was the old Russian-hater who started it all, Karl Marx...