Dead Men Tell Tales

The appropriate moment for a man to die is nowhere so well understood as in the Soviet Union. Thus the latest edition of the Big Soviet Encyclopedia lauds Stanislav Faddeevich Dorozynski, an early naval airman who made one of the first flights across the Baltic, as a "pioneer of Russian aviation," but carefully notes that he perished in a crash back in 1912.

Apprised of his untimely death last week after a studious grandson came across the encyclopedia item, grizzled Aviator Dorozynski, a spry 76-year-old who has been living these many years in Nice, recalled that he had suffered a rib-cracking smashup in 1912, but that he had lived on to enjoy a considerable career.

Czar Nicholas II sent him on an official mission to buy airplanes for a Russian air corps, later named him air chief of his Black Sea fleet--events which, in the Soviet view, obviously should not have occurred. Said Dorozynski last week: "Tell them I am strong, healthy, cheerful--and smiling."

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