Foreign News: From A to Finis

Otto Yulevich Shmidt is a bearded Soviet academician, mathematician and Polar explorer. At the age of 56 he is also a man of remarkable longevity.

In 1926 the Soviet State Publishing House put out Volume One of a projected Big Soviet Encyclopedia. Its title page listed Shmidt as chief of a 14-man board of editors made up entirely of Old Bolsheviks; Karl Radek and Nicolai Bukharin were among them. As years passed, and volume followed volume to the presses, purge followed purge. Radek was imprisoned, Bukharin shot, and one by one the names on Volume One's title page disappeared in Stalin's great...

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