Word: buys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This does not make perestroika popular. A middle-aged book translator in Moscow says that votes for Yeltsin were votes against the establishment and Gorbachev. But doesn't Gorbachev represent change? "Who gives a damn about change when you can't buy cheese and aspirin anymore? They've had their circus. Now we want bread." Izvestia reports that when miners in southern Russia lined up for hours to wait for their pay packets, they began to jeer, "And this is perestroika...
...buy time for his reforms, Gorbachev has forced a significant shift of resources away from the military. He has signed a decree cutting Soviet armed forces by 500,000 men within the next two years, helping save 14% of the total military budget and living up to the promise he made in his U.N. speech last December. These cuts have been accompanied by significant changes in doctrine. Conventional forces are being reconfigured to become more defensive in deployment. In addition, the Soviets now speak of maintaining a "reasonable sufficiency" in their nuclear and conventional forces rather than attempting to match...
...nouveau riche, of which she is a proud member. Better yet, call them yuccies -- young upwardly mobile Communists. Osadchuk pays herself a monthly salary of 700 rubles, or $1,120, about three times the average Soviet salary and enough for her family to live very comfortably. Says she: "We buy anything we want." Thanks to the co-op movement, employee profit sharing and other budding forms of entrepreneurship, many Soviets are suddenly earning enough money to do more than just scrape by. They are enjoying a taste of the good life, and some are even becoming wealthy, at least...
...Soviet Union's shortage of hard currency, combined with the Western art-dealing system's devouring search for new product. At last, modern art has a real party use: it brings in sterling, dollars and marks. Scores of Western dealers are swarming over the Moscow studios. They buy through the Ministry of Culture, which generally keeps 40% of the purchase price and passes on 10% to 15% to the artist in hard currency, which can be spent only outside the U.S.S.R., and the rest in rubles. Payment is always slow, and then there...
...their relatives have long had to keep to themselves. A steady stream of visitors from all over the Soviet Union seek out Memorial's cramped Moscow office. Many are elderly women who wait for as long as an hour and a half -- as if "they were lining up to buy sausage," says a Memorial volunteer. One woman, hands trembling, offers to donate a ring that her husband fashioned for her in the prison camps out of a bolt nut. Another, barely keeping back tears, asks for advice about how to discover what happened to her father. She had thought...