Word: ago
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...funny to watch Razhev and Karpov needle each other over dinner. I knew for certain that several years ago it would have been inconceivable that Razhev would be named director of the factory against the will of the city party committee. It would have been even more difficult to imagine that a collective of workers would have the right to elect...
...translator for the Foreign Ministry before switching to journalism in 1972, Shinkaretsky joined Good Evening, Moscow! three years ago. "I decided to use glasnost to the hilt," he recalls. Today he is often recognized on the street, and he is peppered with questions. At the store where he checked for nitrates, a stooped old woman approached him and asked, "Can you do something about the lack of toothpaste...
...Andrei Fedorov ran a state-owned restaurant in Moscow, he made 190 rubles ($304) a month even if no one came to dinner. "I didn't care if we had customers or not," he says with a shrug. "I didn't care if the service was good." Two years ago, he started his own now popular bistro, Kropotkinskaya 36, just off Sadovaya Ring Road in the Soviet capital. Fedorov pays himself about 850 rubles ($1,360) a month, nearly four times the average Soviet salary. But he works twice as hard as he ever did as a government employee...
Like Fedorov's restaurant, the co-op movement has taken off -- but it faces a bumpy ride. Although they now account for only about 1% of the country's economy, the 48,000 Soviet co-ops (there were only a handful a year ago) employ some 770,000 workers. The services they offer read like a Yellow Pages directory: animal grooming, auto repairs, computer maintenance, hairstyling, plumbing, translating -- even operating pay toilets...
...button on sale at Moscow's Izmailovo open-air market not long ago neatly captured the country's traditional attitude toward sex: IN THE SOVIET UNION, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SEX. As far as public discussion is concerned, the statement is not far from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology...