Word: arbat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Culture has not remained the exclusive domain of Moscow intellectuals. On the Arbat pedestrian mall, would-be Pushkins and Pasternaks peddle their autographed poetry for a ruble or more a page. Sunday painters in Izmailovo Park display their labored tributes to the Russian futurists, suprematists and constructivists of the early 20th century. More than 200 experimental studio theaters have sprouted in Moscow alone. The cultural explosion has been felt as far away as the Pacific port of Nakhodka, where local artists set up a puppet theater workshop, and in Yaroslavl in the Soviet heartland, scene of a rollicking street festival...
There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
...attack on the motherland -- a Russian-language version of Monopoly. Although negotiations for the board game's actual introduction into the Soviet Union are still under way, Monopoliia will be unveiled on Oct. 17 at the World Monopoly Championship in London. Instead of Boardwalk, players will land on Arbat, a pedestrian mall in Moscow where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev strolled during the May summit. All references to stocks, which are not sold in the Soviet Union, have been changed to bonds. But the familiar tokens -- the car, the dog, even the plutocrat's top hat -- remain the same, although...
That appeal apparently had little effect, and later in the day Reagan got a lesson in U.S. and Soviet cultural differences. When he and Nancy went for an unscheduled walk around the Arbat, a quaint Moscow shopping mall, the friendly but thrusting crowds alarmed the KGB. Guards appeared out of nowhere to form a flying wedge around the Reagans and roughed up everyone from journalists to children. "It's still a police state," the President was heard to mutter. That night Reagan was expected to visit the Moscow apartment of Yuri and Tanya Zieman, refuseniks who have been denied permission...
Back in the Arbat, Sasha's family and friends grapple with their lives and careers, while the Kremlin bureaucracy manhandles a recalcitrant economy, ponders the growing power of Hitler's Germany and worries about which way Stalin will jump. Readers expecting a personification of moral depravity will be disappointed. Instead, Rybakov's Stalin resembles a deeply suspicious and ruthless vestige of the revolutionary past -- if not a historical necessity, at least an inevitability...