Word: rostov
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...Brotherland's countless fratricidal quarrels, satellite Bulgaria in 1949 charged Deputy Premier Traicho Rostov with plotting against the Communist regime and, just to give the case its proper anticapitalist flavor, accused U.S. Minister Donald R. Heath of conspiring with Kostov. The U.S. promptly broke off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria. Since then, Switzerland has been handling U.S. interests in Bulgaria, and Poland has been looking after Bulgarian affairs in the U.S. In 1956 the Bulgarians re-examined the Kostov case, exonerated Kostov himself-years after he had been executed. The U.S. ever since has been bombarded by the Bulgars with...
...some principle by which the names have been changed to protect the guilty, Leon Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, in this novel is called Victor Rostov. But there is no doubt that the book is about the chess-playing, intellectual Commissar of War (1918-25) who lost his long struggle for power with Stalin. Trotsky became the grand heretic of a religion whose god is the state; it was his peculiar hell that he never ceased to believe in the religion that had made him its principal devil...
...still turn on joviality like tap water, laugh off Khrushchev's blunted barbs, and knock back bottoms-up toasts in the Armenian cognac he calls "best on earth." He remains the Kremlin's jauntiest dresser and spriest waltzer. His wife Anush (whom he found in Rostov's Armenian colony just after the revolution) calls him babnik, which means flatterer. She once declared that he was one of only two hand-kissing, courtly gentlemen in Moscow (the other: Lavrenty Beria). They have four sons (another was killed in World War II): two are in the air force...
...might almost have been better if the adaptation had departed as far from the facts of the novel as it does from its spirit. The central event--Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812--still remains, and so do a considerable number of the major characters. Natasha Rostov still falls in love with the noble soldier, Prince Andrey, and out again, and in again just before Andrey dies. Pierre Bezuhov still marries a worthless woman and fights a duel over her. But their actions, as well as those of some of the minor characters, often appear purely mechanical, without...
...Great Rewrite. One of the chief side effects of the Great Rewrite of history is the rehabilitation of former "Titoist criminals," dead or alive. Among last week's subjects for party absolution was Traicho Rostov, a Bulgarian Communist who had shocked his judges and been hissed in court when he denied having made the 32,000-word "confession" of traitorous acts presented at his trial in 1949. Last week it seemed that Rostov, who had been duly hanged, was really innocent all along...