A kolkhoz was a collective farm, a kolkhoznik a member of the farm collective; a kulak was the derogatory term for a wealthy peasant, considered to be an enemy of the Soviet regime under Stalin. The Komsomol was the Communist youth organization, the junior branch being the pioneers. "Iron Felix" was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the "Cheka," the forerunner of the NKVD; COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, was an economic association of East 'European countries during the Soviet era. "Beriozka" stores were created exclusively to sell goods to foreign visitors, who paid not in rubles but in foreign currency; some of these accepted vouchers from Soviet citizens who worked abroad and could exchange foreign currency for vouchers. Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov was army chief of staff from 1941 onward; Geidar Ali Rza Ogly Aliev was a KGB general. A kommunalka was a communal apartment. The terms perestroïka (reconstruction, reorganization) and glasnost (openness) became watchwords during the period of Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalization of the Soviet regime from 1985 onward.

G. S.

A HERO'S DAUGHTER

1

HOW FRAGILE AND STRANGE EVERYTHING IS down here

on earth…

What his life had depended on was a fragment of tarnished mirror held in the fingers, blue with cold, of a medical orderly, slim as a young girl.

For there he lay, in this vernal meadow churned up by tanks, amid hundreds of greatcoats, all solidified during the night into an icy mass. The jagged ends of shattered beams bristled upward from a dark crater to the left of them. Close at hand, its wheels sunk into a half collapsed trench, an antitank gun pointed up at the sky.