Black and White Houses?

Paul Dukes on the development of the White House and the Kremlin.

Regularly in the media, news from the Soviet Union and the United States is relayed against background pictures of the Kremlin and the White House. The impression is thereby reinforced that the Soviet President is the heir of the tsars who built the Kremlin, while the American President stems from a line begun by the original occupants of the White House. In the first case, we are reminded of Ivan III and IV, the Great and the Terrible, struggling against centrifugal princes and refractory boyars to establish the dominance of Moscow, to make themselves fully equal to Caesars and Kaisers as Tsars of All the Russias.

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