Cancer Ward (83 page)

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 A form of contract bridge.

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 March 5, 1955, was the second anniversary of Stalin's death.

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 The word “Construction” is here used in the communist sense of “constructing a new society.”

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 A feature of Stalin's “Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” the last of his grandiose schemes, It has now been abandoned.

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 Plevna was captured by the Russians in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877—78. The irony is that both Ahmadjan and his partner belong to Turkic nationalities, and can understand one another's dialect.

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 A racially insulting word for Uzbeks, used by Russians.

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 The most northerly large city in the Soviet Union.

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 March 8 is celebrated in the Soviet Union as International Women's Day. Originally the date was to mark the solidarity of the world's female proletariat, but now it has become simply an occasion for flower-giving and greetings from men to women.

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 Students in Soviet colleges are divided into groups, each of which has its monitor. Part of the monitor's duty is to organize participation in “volunteer tasks,” such as helping the collective farmers with the harvest or construction workers with their extra work on Sundays.

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 The biggest department store in Moscow.

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 A group of colleagues who try a man for social misdemeanors. Its decision has no legal power but it can refer a case to a regular court.

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In a “comradely court” this would not be an official public prosecutor but someone put forward by “medical public opinion” for the purpose.

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 This saying of Karl Marx has become a proverb in communist countries.

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 At that time tractor stations had the function of lending agricultural machinery to collective farms. Their management had a decisive say in the management of agriculture. The allusion is to one of countless reorganizations in the management of these stations.

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 Khrushchev had just become Party Leader. He believed that wide cultivation of maize in the north of Russia would solve grain and fodder problems, and called upon Young Communists to fight those who didn't believe maize could be grown there. His scheme, however, was defeated by the climate.

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 The best-known agricultural college in the Soviet Union.

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 A fashionable resort in the Northern Caucasus.

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 Voluntary, unpaid manual labor was a feature of communist education and applied to everyone, including some white-collar officials.

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 The revolutionary program expounded by Lenin in April, 1917, after his return to Russia from Switzerland.

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 The best-known Russian satirist of the nineteenth century (1826–1889).

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 The term used in the Soviet Union to describe World War I.

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 An assistant doctor, not fully qualified, who provides medical treatment in rural areas of the Soviet Union.

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 In November, 1930, several leading Soviet scientists and economists were sentenced to death as “wreckers” for working for a counterrevolutionary Industrial Party. The party was, in fact, nonexistent. Their trial was one of the signs of the coming Great Purge.

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 The “Chief Political Administration,” one of the many names held by the Soviet security police during its history.

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 This war, fought during the winter of 1939–40, revealed a terrible unpreparedness within the Red Army. The result was a certain disillusionment with Stalin's rule.

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 A line from the classical Russian opera by Dargomyzhski.

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 By “ignorant agronomist” he means Trofim Lysenko, the scientist who dominated Soviet biology until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 and destroyed many of his opponents by denouncing them to the security police. The “horticulturist” is Ivan Michurin, a specialist in growing new varieties of fruit trees whose name was misused by Lysenko.

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 Lenin's widow.

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 An old Bolshevik, in charge of industrialization in the Soviet Union during the thirties, who committed suicide in 1937.

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 Georg Herwegh (1817–1875), a German revolutionary poet, at one time a friend of Karl Marx. The lines quoted mean: “Until our hand turns to ashes,/ Shall it let drop the sword?/We have loved long enough;/Now, finally, we wish to hate.”

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 A Russian religious thinker (1853–1900) whose ideas are an important influence on modern Russian non-Marxist thought.

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 A leading ideologist of populist socialism (1840–1904).

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 Tolstoy's drama about peasant life.

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 The capital of Kazakhstan, one of the republics of the Soviet Union.

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 Lavrenti Beria was responsible for sentencing millions of men to forced labor.

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 A small, popular make of Russian automobile.

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 Mita is also an exile, because she is of German origin, though in a different category from Kostoglotov, exiled for a personal reason.

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 A quotation from a Pushkin poem.

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 Vladimir Mayakovsky, the great Futurist poet and supporter of the Russian Revolution, who shot himself in 1930.

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 Oleg had originally been sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code.

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 The place of Stalin's exile before the Revolution.

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 The New Economic Policy of limited private enterprise, begun by Lenin in 1921.

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 A Russian national drink, a fermentation usually of bread.

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 A spa in the Northern Caucasus.