Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seven days last November, 32,000 Austrian soldiers slogged through a muddy stretch of the Danube River valley in what was billed as the country's biggest military exercise since World War II. Though the Austrians invited observers from all the East bloc countries to watch the maneuvers, they were not pleased with the interest shown by a middle-aged man who turned up around the barracks in the small town of St. Polten. He wore high rubber boots, and carried the classic impedimenta of espionage: a camera, binoculars, maps and a notebook...
Their quarry was Kurt Schilling, 57, a Swiss business consultant working, he insisted, in "the interests of Swiss defense." At first the Austrians laughed: they thought he was an East bloc spy. Then Swiss officials discovered that Schilling had indeed been dispatched on an information-gathering mission, albeit unauthorized, by one Colonel Albert Bachmann, a defense department intelligence officer. Reflecting the surprise shared by Austrians at the revelation that a freelance spook from their equally neutral neighbor had been snooping on them, the Vienna daily Die Presse dubbed Schilling "the spy who came in from the Emmentaler," the best-known...
...inflation is a disease unique to capitalism. "With the exception of the war years," triumphs Nikolai Glushkov, chairman of the Soviet State Committee on Prices, "there has never been any inflation in the U.S.S.R., nor does any exist today." Now let us all laugh, comrades. The East bloc, like the West, is suffering a severe dose of rapidly rising consumer prices. It is not called inflation but "an adjustment in the state pricing structure." Inflation by any other name stinks as badly...
Rumors of forthcoming official price rises constantly sweep East bloc countries and produce sporadic shortages as shops are cleaned out. Buyers also suffer from hidden prices that the state slides in without fanfare. A product-for example, a $45 electric razor-suddenly might be given a new model number, a different color or a fresh package, and a new price...
...West, a major reason the East bloc's surging prices is the inflation in world oil. Russia is energy self-sufficient, and it supplies European satellites with about 80% of their needs. The prices of that crude are based on an OPEC formula, and they are going up-albeit at a slower rate...