Word: co
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...name is Mikhail, and I'm an alcoholic," says the next speaker. Sober only a short while, Mikhail, 41, stayed home from work on his last birthday out of fear that his co-workers would insist on celebrating the event with a bottle. "I don't want to talk about my drinking tonight. I just want to thank you for the chance to express myself honestly. Until I came here, I had never done that before...
...cooperative enterprises to supplement and even compete with state-run projects. The primary goal of his proposal, which in many respects echoed Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy of 1921, was to inject vitality into the U.S.S.R.'s laggard consumer goods and services industries. In addition, the new co-ops would pay taxes and presumably absorb some of the 15 million workers who might lose their jobs in a much needed pruning of the bureaucracy...
Like Fedorov's restaurant, the co-op movement has taken off -- but it faces a bumpy ride. Although they now account for only about 1% of the country's economy, the 48,000 Soviet co-ops (there were only a handful a year ago) employ some 770,000 workers. The services they offer read like a Yellow Pages directory: animal grooming, auto repairs, computer maintenance, hairstyling, plumbing, translating -- even operating pay toilets...
Despite Gorbachev's strong support for the co-op movement, many apparatchiks remain hostile. Under prodding from the bureaucracy, the Soviet Council of Ministers last December imposed stringent new limits on co-ops in such sensitive areas as medicine, education and publishing. More crackdowns are imminent. One Moscow businessman charges that the bureaucrats are jealous of his success, constantly asking how much money he makes rather than how much in taxes he pays. This entrepreneur is appalled by the system's endemic shakedowns: "Say I'm in private publishing, which is no longer allowed under the new cooperative decree...
...impossible had happened. Since the building 15 years ago of the pipeline that carries Alaskan oil from the North Slope to Valdez for shipment by tanker to the West Coast, oil companies had been shrugging off environmentalists' forebodings of just such an occurrence. In January 1987, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium of oil companies (including Exxon) that manages the pipeline, filed a contingency plan with the Federal Government detailing how it would handle a 200,000-bbl. spill in Prince ; William Sound. Alyeska did so only grudgingly, however, protesting, "It is highly unlikely that a spill of this magnitude...