Finally, when the White pressure from the north increased and the position became admittedly grave, Strelnikov was entrusted with new responsibilities, military, strategic, and operational. His interventions produced immediate results.
Strelnikov (“the shooter”) knew that rumor had nicknamed him Razstrelnikov, the Executioner. Boys free nude he took this in his stride; he was disturbed by nothing.
He was a native of Moscow, and his father boys free nude was a worker who had boys free nude been sent to prison boys free nude for taking part in the revolution of 1905. He did not boys free nude participate in boys free nude the revolutionary movement in those years, first because he was too young, and at the university because young men who come from a poor background value higher education more and work harder than the children of the rich. The ferment among other students left boys free nude him uninvolved. He absorbed an immense amount of information boys free nude and after
taking boys free nude his degree in the humanities trained himself later in boys free nude science and mathematics.
Exempted from the army, he enlisted voluntarily, was commissioned, sent to the front, and captured, and on hearing of the revolution in Russia he escaped in 1917 boys free nude and came home. He had two characteristic features, two passions: an unusual power of clear and logical reasoning, and a great moral purity and sense of justice; he was ardent and honorable.
But he boys free nude would boys free nude not
have made a scientist of the sort who break new ground. His intelligence lacked the capacity for bold leaps into the unknown, the sudden flashes of insight that transcend barren, logical deductions.
And if he were really boys free nude to do good, he boys free nude would have needed, in addition to his principles, a heart capable boys free nude of violating them—a heart which knows only of particular, not of general, cases, and which achieves greatness in little actions.
Filled with boys free nude the loftiest aspirations from his childhood, he had looked upon the boys free nude world as a vast arena where everyone competed for boys free nude perfection, keeping scrupulously to the rules. When he found boys free nude that this was not so, it did not occur to him that his conception of the world order might have been oversimplified. He nursed his grievance and with it the ambition to judge between life and the dark forces
that distorted
it, and to be life’s boys free nude champion and avenger.
Embittered by his disappointment, he was armed by the revolution.
31
“Zhivago,” repeated Strelnikov when they were settled in his room. “Zhivago ... Trade.