Viktor M. Sukhodrev, Soviet Leaders’ Trusted Interpreter

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In 1979, Viktor M. Sukhodrev, center, with Jimmy Carter, left, and Leonid I. Brezhnev, right. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

 

Mr. Sukhodrev was often trusted as the sole interpreter between leaders at summit meetings at the height of the Cold War. As Khrushchev harangued foreign diplomats at a reception at the Polish Embassy in Moscow in 1956, it was Mr. Sukhodrev who indelibly rendered Khrushchev’s words into English as “We will bury you.”

Countess Felicia Gizycka

In a front-page essay reviewing two books, entitled Dynasts of the Daily Press, Joseph Epstein quotes the countess, great-granddaughter of Joseph Medill, whose only flaw in his otherwise perfect game plan was his children. He had no sons but three daughters, one of whom died young. The surviving daughters, Katherine and Elinor, he described as “the worst two she-devils in all Chicago.” His great-­granddaughter Felicia Gizycka claimed that this was the bowdlerized description and that what he had actually said was “the two biggest bitches in Christendom.”

This obituary from the Tuesday, 18 May 1999 edition of the UK's Independent, perfectly displays a style that no US newspaper would dare use.

It was also a custom of the era to view American heiresses as the easiest method to restore European aristocratic fortunes and Cissy was pursued by an impoverished nobleman, Count Josef Gizycki, a hard-drinking ladies' man with a bankrupt estate in Russian Poland. Cissy fell for dashing Count "Gigi" and, despite pleas from her family, married him. No sooner did she reach his dilapidated, freezing "castle" in Narvosielica than she realised her mistake; he told her bluntly that they had sex only to make a child and so that he could gain her $30,000 a year income. In 1905 that child, Felicia, was born whilst the Count was away whoring.

Epstein writes: Cissy, after a wretched marriage to a Russian-Polish aristocrat named Josef Gizycki — he disappeared on her on their wedding night, drank heavily, beat her and absconded with their daughter, Felicia — flounced about Washington as the Countess Gizycka, a social butterfly with the fangs of a viper.

No whoring allowed in the New York Times, or, at least, on its printed and web pages.

Solzhenitsyn's translator`

Bella Akhmadulina

From an LA Times posting, this pictures captures something uniquely Russian. No US president would ever think of kissing a woman's hand, no US poet would ever be so honored and mean so much to her people, and no US president, even if there were one named Boris, would ever embody what Yelstin did.

Even another Russian president does not match Boris Yeltsin.

Ms. Akhmadulina came to prominence during the post-Stalin thaw, when a loosening of censorship led to a flowering of the arts. Along with the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko (her first husband) and Andrei Voznesensky, she became one of the bold new voices in contemporary Russian literature, attracting ecstatic audiences of thousands to readings at concert halls and stadiums.

Viktor Chernomyrdin

President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed Mr. Chernomyrdin prime minister in 1992, and he remained in that post through the most painful years of economic turmoil. Initially a champion of market reform, he later let it be known that he thought Western economic theory had done “more harm than good.”

Doyen of the international diplomatic corps

Anatoly Dobrynin helped to negotiate peaceful coexistence between the world's two superpowers during some of the darkest days of the Cold War, and became the doyen of the international diplomatic corps in Washington. Mr. Dobrynin, who died Tuesday at age 90, was the U.S.S.R.'s chief diplomat to the U.S. for a quarter century. His posting almost literally started with a bang when, just months after his appointment in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis flared.

When the Soviets were discovered constructing nuclear launchpads in Cuba, President Kennedy imposed a blockade and it seemed that war threatened. Hostilities were averted after Mr. Dobrynin agreed to a deal by which NATO missiles based in Turkey were removed as a quid pro quo for the Cuban missiles. By then, Mr. Dobrynin had set up the "back channel" communications with the White House that included entering the State Department through the garage and using the secretary of state's private elevator. Starting in the détente-minded Nixon administration, he enjoyed a dedicated hotline to Henry Kissinger.

Associated Press - Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, left, listened to Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, on the South Lawn of the White House in December 1974.

Mr. Dobrynin's extraordinary diplomatic privileges were suspended under President Reagan, but Mr. Dobrynin eventually won over even the architect of the 1980s military buildup. When the urbane Mr. Dobrynin was recalled to Moscow to become a high Communist Party official in 1986, an astonished Reagan is said to have asked, "Is he a Communist?"

The first U.S.S.R. ambassador to the U.S. born after the Bolshevik Revolution, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin was the son of a plumber and a theater usher. Trained as an aviation engineer, he was working in a fighter-plane factory in 1944 when he was recruited for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on orders from Stalin, who wanted technicians and not intellectuals as diplomats. During the 1950s, Mr. Dobrynin served in the Soviet Embassy in Washington and then at the United Nations. He accompanied Soviet leader Khrushchev on a 1959 visit to the U.S.

After helping to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mr. Dobrynin was part of all the superpower diplomatic milestones, including summits, the development of détente, as well as treaties that limited nuclear weapons. Part of his skill was communicating the ways of America to his masters in Moscow. In his 1995 memoir "In Confidence," Mr. Dobrynin wrote that during a 1972 meeting at Camp David, Soviet leader Brezhnev thought President Nixon had presented him an inexpensive gift, a Steuben glass eagle. Brezhnev gave it to Mr. Dobrynin, saying "I don't need it. You take it." Mr. Dobrynin informed the premier that it was valued at $30,000 or more. "Really?" Brezhnev said. "Give it back."

Anatoly Dobrynin 1919-2010: Cold-War Envoy

By STEPHEN MILLER
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

Soviet soldier in historic WW II photo

Found this in the Baltimore Sun, February 17, 2010.

A Red Army soldier who appears in a historic photograph helping hoist a hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 has died, officials said in Moscow. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, 93, died of unspecified causes Tuesday in his native village of Chagar-Otar, the press office of the president of Russia’s southern province of Dagestan said Wednesday. Ismailov was one of the three Soviet soldiers seen in a photograph taken three days after the fall of Berlin in May 1945. He stands beneath the man holding the flagpole.

The photo became an iconic image of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. It has often been compared with the 1945 Associated Press photograph of U.S. soldiers raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. The Soviet photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, said years later that the image was staged, and the flag was sewn from three tablecloths. He said the original hammer-and-sickle flag flown from the Reichstag was shot down by German snipers.

Ismailov was identified in the photograph only in 1996 and was awarded a Hero of Russia medal. During WWII, he was part of a motorized infantry battalion and was wounded five times. After the war, he served as a chairman of a collective farm and as a Communist Party official.

-- Associated Press

Photo: In this image from May 2, 1945, Red Army soldiers hoist the Soviet flag over Berlin. Abdulkhakim Ismailov, just below the flag bearer, died Tuesday. Credit: Associated Press / ITAR-TASS, Yevgeny Khaldei

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