Here today, gone tomorrow

Yesterday's ice disappeared overnight as the temperature rose from around minus 6C to zero.  I am always a bit surprised at how quickly ice forms and disappears on the River.  This is the Sofiyskaya Embankment which runs directly opposite the Kremlin.  Between 1964 and 1994, the embankment was known as "Maurice Thorez Embankment"  after the leader of the French Communist Party.  Thorez was an acquaintance of Stalin and spent the war years in the Soviet Union having deserted the army in France.  Like the ice, he too was once prominent and then transient.

"War, economic crisis, unemployment, the expropriation and ruin of the middle classes are not our doing. They are the result of the private property of the great means of production, which has become — after having been a stimulant — a hindrance to economic life and progress."  M. Thorez, circa 1960. For some, this assertion may be as valid today as it was 60 years ago!