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Soyuz, should inherit the Ministry of Finance, they argued, in order to "save the Russian motherland from the conspiracies of the American and European bankers." |
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He was at once consumed with an icy rage and, at the same time, truly frightened. The plotters were far ahead of him. They were very close to isolating him, leaving him with no one to speak to the people or to those in the parliament who supported him, now that Milstein was dead. |
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Kondratiev's vision of the future under the governance of Soyuz was that the President of Russia be only a figurehead, bypassed as though he were an obsolete strongpoint on some fluid war front, where battle was dark, and dubious, and far from heroic. |
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What were the lines of that Englishman's poem? |
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And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. |
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How well he put it, Cherny thought. It was the chilling ignorance that was so frightening. Through the high window he watched a soldier of the guard walking his post on the Inner Kremlin wall. He felt an insane impulse to call to the man, to ask him if he were guarding his chief of state, or if he were confining him. How surprised the soldier would be, how silly he would think the President. He would tell all his fellows about it when he was off duty. Our President is a fool, he would say, and he would be right. Only a fool could have managed not to see and to understand all that was going on, right under his nose. It is my nature and my training to consider, to ponder, to speculate, to discuss, and to do nothing for fear of making things worse. |
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What was it that Freud had said about intellectuals? Oh, yes; that the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic formthe printed page. It has been my blessing and my curse, Cherny thought. Now, I must fight, whether by myself or by summoning those |
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