Arrow Russian Quotes

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

The next morning at dawn Tatiana stumbled out to the water, barely able to walk. She felt raw. Alexander followed her in. The Kama was cold. They were both naked. “I brought soap,” he said. “Oh, my.” Alexander washed her entire body. “With this soap I thee wash,” he sleepily murmured. “I wash you of the horrors that befell you, and I wash you of your nightmares…I wash your arms and your legs and your love-giving heart and your life-giving belly—” “Give me the soap,” Tatiana said. “I’ll wash you.” “Wait, how does it go? What did God say to Moses—” “Have no idea.” “Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day…” Alexander broke off. “I can’t remember the rest of it. Certainly not in Russian. Something about ten thousand falling at your right hand. I’ve got to brush up on my Bible and tell it to you. I think you’d like it. But you get my meaning.” “I get your meaning,” Tatiana said. “I won’t be afraid.” She gazed at him. “How can I be afraid now?” she whispered. “Look what I’ve been given. Give me the soap,” she repeated. “I can’t stand up,” Alexander muttered. “I’m finished.” Her hands with the soap moved lower. “Not quite finished.” He fell backward in the water. “Done for, certainly,” Tatiana said, falling on top of him. “But not finished.

He drew maps of Bulgaria in the dust, enormous as it had been more than five centuries ago, before the Turks had taken over our land. He’d draw a circle around the North and say “This is called Moesia. This is where we live, free at last, thanks to the Russian brothers.” Then he’d circle the South. “This is Thrace. It stayed part of the Turkish empire for seven years after the North was freed, but now we are one, united. And this,” he’d say and circle farther south, “is Macedonia. Home to Bulgarians, but still under the fez.” He’d brush fingers along the lines and watch the circles for a long time, put arrows where he thought the Russians should invade and crosses where battles should be waged. Then he’d spit in the dust and draw the rest of Europe and circle it, and circle Africa and Asia. “One day, siné, all these continents will be Bulgarian again. And maybe the seas.

In 1913, on the eve of World War I, the Russian mathematician Andrei Markov published a paper applying probability to, of all things, poetry. In it, he modeled a classic of Russian literature, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, using what we now call a Markov chain. Rather than assume that each letter was generated at random independently of the rest, he introduced a bare minimum of sequential structure: he let the probability of each letter depend on the letter immediately preceding it. He showed that, for example, vowels and consonants tend to alternate, so if you see a consonant, the next letter (ignoring punctuation and white space) is much more likely to be a vowel than it would be if letters were independent. This may not seem like much, but in the days before computers, it required spending hours manually counting characters, and Markov’s idea was quite new. If Voweli is a Boolean variable that’s true if the ith letter of Eugene Onegin is a vowel and false if it’s a consonant, we can represent Markov’s model with a chain-like graph like this, with an arrow between two nodes indicating a direct dependency between the corresponding variables: Markov assumed (wrongly but usefully) that the probabilities are the same at every position in the text. Thus we need to estimate only three probabilities: P(Vowel1 = True), P(Voweli+1 = True | Voweli = True), and P(Voweli+1 = True | Voweli = False). (Since probabilities sum to one, from these we can immediately obtain P(Vowel1 = False), etc.) As with Naïve Bayes, we can have as many variables as we want without the number of probabilities we need to estimate going through the roof, but now the variables actually depend on each other.