Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...part by transfusions to anemic factories and by subsidies for food and housing -- is about 11% of the GNP, by some estimates. The ruble, arbitrarily said to be worth $1.60 but not freely convertible into dollars or other Western currencies, brings as little as 10 cents on the black market. But price controls have repressed the latent inflation, and people have more paper money -- about 300 billion rubles in savings -- than there are goods available for purchase...
...most radical paintings were the suprematist compositions he made between 1913 and the mid-1920s. To imagine that these were just formal exercises is to underrate them. Malevich thought of his black square and its cousins -- the white-on-white geometries, the crisp arrangements of colored planes floating in space as deep as the sky -- as icons, points of entry into a superior spiritual world. Their vividness, their power to fix one's attention, is also the vividness of the staring eyes of a pantocrator...
Katya Mikhulskaya giggles as she shows off her outfit -- a red-and-gold- braid ed army jacket paired with a frilly white lace skirt -- then coquettishly pulls up her hem to reveal black knee-high jackboots. Mikhulskaya, 23, developed her theory of fashion from years of riding the Moscow metro, where she saw women wearing a tasteless hodgepodge because the state-controlled fashion industry had made it impossible for them to put together well-coordinated wardrobes. "When it comes to fashion in Moscow," she says, "a sense of humor is especially important." Her fellow designer, Katya Fillipova, 29, pokes...
...Cyclone fence and metal bars encircle the stage. Like a caged animal, a slender young woman in black paces back and forth. Suddenly, she rattles the prison door, her pale features exposed by the spotlight. "Three hundred forty-nine days! Three hundred forty-nine days!" she screams. "Bite on your hat, anything to keep from sobbing!" Few in the audience at Moscow's Sovremennik Theater stifle the emotion inspired by such searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches...
...almost 50 years there were whispered stories about black vans that drove every night into a fenced enclosure in the Kurapaty forest, about gunshots and screams waking villagers who lived nearby. But not until last spring did the full horror begin to be known. Workers digging a trench for a gas pipeline through the forest near Minsk came across a heap of human skulls pierced by bullets from Nagant revolvers fired at close range. The prosecutor of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic set up a commission to investigate the murders. Last July more skulls and bones were unearthed, along with...