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Juan Antonio Samaranch passed away on April...
those gifts back in 1977, soon after he was appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union. Samaranch often recalled the episode, and a detailed account is provided in a book by Alexander Ratner, Samaranch"s irreplaceable interpreter, who was the Soviet Olympic Committee press attache at the time: "The Soviet capital was hosting a major international forum a few days after I first arrived there. The guests included a delegation of Spanish Communists led by Dolores Ibarruri and Santiago Carrillo. I went to the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin to find them and told them that I would be pleased to receive them at the ambassador"s residence. They accepted my invitation and came. With that we proved that Spain"s political problems were a thing of the past. A new era had begun..."Vitaly Smirnov came to Samaranch"s rescue in 1992, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when it looked like they wouldn"t send a Russian team to Barcelona, leaving its main rival, the
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