Word: chairman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...luxury items. Even such Western staples as cars, refrigerators and washing machines are in chronically short supply. As a result, well-off Soviets often have much more money than they need for smaller indulgences, including restaurant meals, videos and stereo gear. "Money slips through our fingers," says Vladimir Ivlev, chairman of a Moscow clothing cooperative that pays him a monthly salary of 2,000 rubles...
Memorial's members include such prominent intellectuals as poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, historian Medvedev and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, who serves as the group's honorary chairman. But its most important role is to provide an outlet for the grief and pain that victims of Stalin and 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...
...change in attitude is much needed. Soviet doctors estimate that as much as 50% of the population is seriously overweight. Says Dr. Vasili Vorobyev, chairman of a year-old private fitness clinic in Moscow that serves 600 clients a day: "More Soviet people die from the medical problems associated with being overweight than from any other cause." Now, explains Arkhangelskaya, "our people have a new interest in losing weight, and health centers like this one are growing." Doctors at the fitness center, one of six state-run clinics in Moscow, see 80 to 100 customers a day. Cost...
...Tashkent-based Muslim board for Central Asia, the most important of the four government-imposed bureaucracies for Soviet Islam, Deputy Chairman Abdulgani Abdulla recalls that "almost nobody was interested in religion" in the 1960s. Now, he reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people...
Gennadi Yagodin, appointed last year as chairman of the State Committee for Public Education, has been blunt about the failings of teachers. Many cannot be replaced or re-educated, he says; the system is simply stuck with them. Money is another problem. Yagodin has promised to double the budget for new school construction and teaching materials. But the biggest need, he feels, is for free thinking. Says Yagodin: "The school badly wants more democracy." In the end, only a generation of new teachers, trained in the era of glasnost, may be able to carry out the sweeping school reform...