Jacob's Ladder

* The Black Hundreds was an ultranationalist movement in Russia in the early twentieth century that supported the House of Romanov and opposed any challenge to the autocracy of the emperor.

* The so-called Bulldozer Exhibition was an infamous, unofficial open-air art exhibition held on September 15, 1974, in Moscow. The exhibition was broken up by the police, using bulldozers and water cannons.

* The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy adopted in Soviet Russia in 1921–28 with the goal of salvaging the national economy after the Russian Civil War of 1917–22.

† The Industrial Party (‘Prompartija’) Trial was the first of many show trials, culminating in Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937, in which prominent members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, among others, and later Party officials themselves, were accused on trumped-up charges of sabotage and treason against the Soviet state. Many of the accused, though innocent, pleaded guilty.

* The “fifth paragraph” was a line in the Soviet passport identifying the ethnicity (or “nationality,” as it is called in Russian) of the bearer, thus sanctioning discrimination on ethnic grounds.