Mark Hopkins
- 1969
Fellowship Title:
- Public Opinion in Eastern Europe
Fellowship Year:
- 1969
Notes From Leningrad
Leningrad, USSR There is something about this city that endears it most of any Soviet city to foreigners. Even the Russians say that Leningrad is a “western” city, founded as it was more than 250 years ago by Czar Peter the Great as his famed “window to the west.” As St. Petersburg, the city was the capital of the Russian empire for successive rulers. Catherine the Great held court here in the 19th century when it was in vogue among the intelligentsia to speak French, instead of Russian. The wild, mystical monk Rasputin cast his spell here, and the last of the Romanov dynasty, the gentle, ineffective Nicholas II abdicated in March, 1917, just a few months before the Bolshevik revolution. The contemporary Leningrad prides itself on being the birthplace of the revolution, and it lays special claim to Lenin himself. Nearly as famous is the World War II defense of Leningrad. For months, the city was out off by German troops. During the blockade, something approximating a million people—a third of the population—died,
Notes From Moscow
Moscow, USSR “Moscow has changed very much in the past few years,” said the cab driver, a World War II veteran of the Moscow battle, as we sped along the expressway from Sheremetevo airport to Red Square. Such as there, he gestured, a new monument marking the closest point of the German advance—a trio of huge replicas of crossed, steel girder tank obstacles. Up ahead were half-finished apartment buildings, sheer white blocks of prefabricated concrete stacked one atop another. An experimental electric delivery truck was traveling our way, on a trial run of its battery-powered motor. My driver discoursed on that a bit, then, as we entered downtown Moscow, he nodded toward a nearby car, “There’s the new Volga.” It is flatter than the bulky old model that has been the workhorse for more than a decade, but still a heavy, squarish-looking machine. And for the moment, the driver said, the new cars are being supplied only to government agencies and enterprises. Elsewhere in Moscow, you can see the new Intourist Hotel, a slab
Poland: The War Goes On
Warsaw, Poland Wars fade slowly in sore countries. In Poland, the war with Germany has barely ended. Warsaw and other Polish cities were splashed with posters and banners this past May when the 25th anniversary of the “defeat of fascism” was celebrated. Movie houses play the war films. Book stores display memoirs and histories of the great battles. Among points of interest recommended in tourist brochures in Warsaw is Palmyra cemetery where one can see the graves of 2,000 men, women and children shot by Germans. Auschwitz and Treblinka are preserved as infamous monuments to the war. The Polish -press gives special emphasis to trials of German war criminals (most recently that of Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka where 750,000 people were methodically executed). Plaques attached to Warsaw buildings record mass killings of partisans or civilian hostages. Many Poles refuse even now, a quarter century after World War II, to speak German. Almost everyone over the age of 35 has a personal recollection of brutality and atrocity at the hands of Germans. In all,
Prague: “A Very Unfavorable Season”
Prague, Czechoslovakia The anger, disillusionment, fear and outrage—all those first emotions that enveloped Prague when Soviet troops occupied the city in August, 1968 have largely spent themselves. They have been replayed so often, and so often frustrated when they engendered action, that Czechoslovaks find it almost impossible to sustain them. Rather, this spring, the many liberals who rallied to Alexander Dubcek and democratic reform confess anxiety and despair. “Rightist opportunists” are being systematically cut from the Communist Party during personal interrogations of each of 1.5 million party members. Those classed as politically unreliable face the bleak probability of unemployment, especially if they occupy positions in the governmental apparatus, the universities or the mass media. The military, too, is undergoing a purge. At one of the numerous ceremonies in May celebrating the 25thanniversary of Prague’s liberation by Soviet forces, Defense Minister Martin Dzur declared that “We are adopting concrete and resolute measures aimed at removing all anti-socialist, rightist opportunist and anti-Soviet forces from the army.” Political “purification” supplemented by the Interior Ministry’s omnipresent rummaging for
Yugoslavia: Notes and Episodes
Belgrade, Yugoslavia Sketches from the program of Atelje 212 production of “Hair.” The Hotel Esplanade’s lobby and lounge this particular night were ornamented with uncommon glitter and elegance. For one thing, a a flock of more affluent Italians was in the Croatian capital of Zagreb for a pigeon shoot, for which each sportsman paid an entrance fee of 3,000 dinars, the equivalent of just under $250, plus an additional $2-50 for every live bird put up before his gun. The call boards, carried silently through public rooms by bellhops in forest green jackets matching a muffling expanse of carpet,, were chalked with distinctly Italian names. And a few of the younger shooters in mod Edwardian coats and bellbottoms hunted through the lobby, eased in red velvet chairs around the bar, or strolled into the gambling casino for roulette. Equally as conspicuous as the Italian crowd was the gathering of Zagreb’s journalists, wives and guests. For their annual dinner dance, clearly an “in” event of the Zagreb social season, the men, most of them, were in