Word: troika
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...precocious boy whose doting mother pampered him and made him wear sailor suits until he was 13. After the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, father Rubinstein, according to Serge, lined his greatcoat with rubles and jewels, and raced off across the frozen Gulf of Finland in a troika. The family followed him four months later, and ten-year-old Serge arrived in Stockholm with money pinned all over his undershirt, and a big sapphire hung around his neck...
...succession of intricate drills and sinuous dances. They displayed great verve, precision and variety. In one number, they moved smoothly, as if on roller skates ("the Russian glide," one critic called it); in another, they did a stomping Cossack dance that shook the floor boards. They formed a troika (with three girls acting as horses), chains, arrows and everything but the hammer & sickle. Most impressive was a number in which 16 girls dressed in silk-embroidered costumes executed parade-ground drills with a precision to rival the Rockettes. There was also a complicated swan dance with each girl holding...
Power & Glory. In May Lenin had a stroke and at the end of the year a second stroke. His place was taken by a troika or triumvirate. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Trotsky was already aware of, and alarmed at, Stalin's stealthy grasp of power. Lenin defended Stalin and warned against a split in the party. He began dictating a testament in which he reviewed his possible successors: "The two most able leaders of the present Central Committee are Stalin and Trotsky . . . Stalin has concentrated enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows...
Some think Stalin deliberately juggles the three men to save any one of them from the temptation to speed up the process of succession. Another theory: that Molotov, Malenkov and Beria might take over together after Stalin's death, to rule the Communist cosmos as a troika (trpumvirate). Those who think this would not last long are increasingly putting their money on "Dear Georgy...