Word: arbat
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...word from Moscow is that Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat is selling like blini on May Day. An initial printing of 500,000 copies sold out faster than the lines could form at the bookshops. As this classic supply-and- demand problem mocked Marxist economics, the cost of the novel rose from the official price of 2.5 rubles ($4.20) to an extortionist 25 rubles on the black market. Plans at Sovietsky Pisatel and Moskovsky Rabochy, the popular author's two publishers, call for at least 2.4 million additional hardbacks in Russian, plus editions in Ukrainian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Estonian...
...unexpected; one might say it was virtually certain. For 20 years Soviet authorities have suppressed the publication of Rybakov's broadly autobiographical novel about power and powerlessness under Stalin just before the purges of the mid-'30s. During the '60s and '70s, the public was teased by announcements that Arbat would soon appear. It never did. Then last year Druzhba Narodov, a Soviet Writers Union periodical, serialized the work in three installments, and the stage was set for the mass market...
Rybakov's book, "The Children of the Arbat," was completed in 1978, but was withheld from publication until last year...
...Moscow's Arbat pedestrian mall, evening strollers cluster around a young guitarist. The music has stopped, and the passersby follow a heated argument between a dowdy middle-aged woman and a policeman. Clearly on the defensive, the officer insists that he is not forbidding the street musician to play but only questioning why he is cadging coins. "Times have changed," the angry music fan counters. "The police should not be sticking their noses into matters that don't concern them." The Moscow cop walks away grumbling, "Right now, anything goes...
...entrepreneurial legions: 12,000 officially registered "individual laborers" and more than 650 "cooperatives." While a policeman looks on benignly, commuters outside Kiev railway station examine the cloth shopping bags, plastic sandals and odds and ends of knitwear on display in a battered truck. Street artists on the Arbat compete for customers. Gorky Park is alive with the sound of plastic bird whistles, costing a relatively hefty 1.50 rubles...