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An irony worth noting is that much credit for winning the Cold War should go to the people Reagan so disliked as governor of California -- the hippies, the anti-Vietnam War protesters and counter-culture figures who in the 1960s produced the music, ideas and ethos of non-conformism that appealed to the educated youth suffocating in the communist world. Those who had the most access to the West, including the children of elite apparatchiki or professionals, found themselves drawn more to Lennon than Lenin, more to Mick than Marx.

Just ask Pavel Palazchenko, the bald, mustachioed interpreter who stood between Reagan and Gorbachev whenever they met. In the 1960s, he studied at the elite Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, where, he recalls in a wise, little-noticed 1997 memoir, the "stupidity of the official ideology was not even funny." For relief, he and his fellow students "scraped enough [money] together for parties with girls and a lot of drinking (vodka was cheap in those days). And we had the Beatles," he said.

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Lennon was shot by a KGB agent!

[ 28 June 2004: Message edited by: clockwork ]

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Originally posted by clockwork:
Lennon was shot by a KGB agent!

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I think not. Lennon was murdered by a Christian fundamentalist.

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When John Lennon was quoted as saying, “We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now,” he turned violently against his one-time hero. Chapman and his Christian friends sang Lennon’s “Imagine” with new lyrics: “Imagine John Lennon is dead.”

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Mark David Chapman

[ 28 June 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]