Word: callings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Osadchuk's eager clientele largely represents a new class of Soviet consumer: the 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...
...previews and cultural debates taking place in the Soviet capital. Time has to be set aside for watching trend-setting "musical- information shows" such as View or the monthly video digest Before and After Midnight, or for perusing the thick monthlies like Novy Mir and Znamya, which Soviets affectionately call the "fat journals." If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as "the thaw," the cultural revolution set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev has proved to be nothing less than a spring flood...
Vsevolod Marinov of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences organized the most extensive Soviet poll ever conducted for a U.S. magazine. Since telephone surveys are relatively new in the Soviet Union, respondents were given a number to call to verify that those asking the questions were legitimate pollsters. "We received only about a dozen call-backs," says Marinov. "Some of them assumed we were officials who could help them with their problems. One woman even wanted her leaking radiator fixed...
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" The call to prayer echoes forth from a minaret in Tashkent, as it has from mosques throughout the 13 centuries of Islam. "Was it loud enough?" asks the mullah who will lead the prayers. That is an eminently reasonable question, since in the Soviet Union no muezzin is allowed to use a loudspeaker. The inquiry is also metaphorical. In the U.S.S.R.'s fourth largest city and leading Islamic center, as elsewhere across the nation, believers are cautiously regaining their public voice after an oppressively enforced silence...
Shinkaretsky, who works for state-run Gosteleradio, has no private office, no producer, no staff. His only status symbol: a beeper that he carries in his shirt pocket. When it flashes the number 6, he knows to call Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's deputy mayor and the official in charge of the city food supply. "We're in cahoots," Shinkaretsky says, and winks...