User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=36}}.By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol

Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=36}}.By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=107}}.

Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where

the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil”~~( )~~.

Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ).

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 {{pg|237|238}}
-Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=36}}.By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol
+Hubbard’s visits to Moscow in Harlot’s Ghost, Oswald’s strange stay in the USSR chronicled in Oswald’s Tale, and Mailer’s own visit just mentioned, the overall impression one gets is that of hum-drum routine. The human energy that was voluntarily and forcibly put into the building of the new state’s infrastructure was long since spent. I say forcibly because prisoners of the Gulag were used as laborers on many major and minor projects, including the building of the Moscow Metro, the extensive system of waterways linking Moscow with Leningrad-Petersburg, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal. The romance associated with the Soviet intervention in Spain, amplified by cultural visits such as the one made by a Basque soccer team in 1937, was also long gone. Even if in the mid 1980s the Soviet Union was still a police state, Stalin’s terror of the 1930s was over as well, and dissidents were, as Mailer wrote in 1984 “ostracized . . . but no longer pulled out of their beds at three in the morning” {{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=36}}.By the mid 1980s, a Soviet version of the middle class had long since formed (at least in the cities) that provided its citizens a stable and predictable way of life. When Hubbard visits the Metropol Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=107}}.
-Hotel in Moscow with “aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it” (Harlot’s, 99), he cannot believe that this is the place where
-the Bolsheviks gathered before and after the Revolution. “I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil”( ).
 Hubbard shortly backs away from this apparently definitive repost to the Reagan doctrine when he reflects that “Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex”( ).Even the statue of fearsome Felix Dzerzhinsky in Lyubanka Square and the Lyubanka prison itself fail to “stir adrenaline” in Hubbard, who knows he might wind up there ( ). When he walks out onto Red Square, whose ancient name means Beautiful Square in Russian, Hubbard is struck by his impression that “[e]ven the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age”( ).