Word: crowded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until last week. Then, in Moscow, the London-based auction house Sotheby's staged the first international art auction ever held in the Soviet Union. An eager crowd of 2,000 packed the ballroom of the Sovincenter, a lavish hotel and conference complex usually off limits to Soviet citizens, to gaze on an array of works that in many cases had rarely been exhibited before, much less sold openly. Bidding was restricted to foreigners who could pay with British pounds...
...nationalists in Armenia, who have been agitating for months for the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan. The conference had hardly ended when activists in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, resumed demonstrations that have occurred sporadically since last February. Last week a crowd of nearly 2,000 massed at the city's airport, paralyzing the facility and causing the cancellation of 60 flights. In clashes with police, 36 of the protesters were injured...
...this evening, though, the crowd has come for something special. Like middle-class Italian kids flocking to see Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, the young Cuban Americans have gathered to see the reigning Reina de la Salsa, Celia Cruz, who was entertaining their parents and their parents' parents in the smoky dens and fancy nightclubs of pre-Castro Cuba long before they were born...
...wearing a snug, sequined fuchsia gown, gyrates for 90 minutes to the insistent beat of her razor-sharp backup band. At the refrain of her old favorite Canto a la Habana (Song to Havana) -- "Cuba que lindos son tus paisajes" (Cuba, what beautiful vistas you have) -- the bilingual crowd goes wild, even though most of those present have never seen Cuba and have little prospect of ever doing so. "We've never had to attract these kids. They come by themselves," says Cruz. "Rock is a strong influence on them, but they still want to know about their roots...
Complaints ranged from the mundane to the exotic. One crowd pleaser was Vladimir Kabaidze, 64, general director of a machine-tool plant in the city of Ivanovo. Earthy and outspoken, Kabaidze took pleasure in skewering the ministerial bureaucracy that oversees Soviet industrial enterprises. Kabaidze offered some feline advice: "If a minister can catch mice, feed him. If he can't, don't bother." He also denounced the bloated cadre of "scientific workers" who are designated to carry out state-supported research-and- development projects but actually perform little productive labor. "I recently heard a horrible statistic," he told the conference...