Word: eras
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the Brezhnev era, rock music was carefully controlled through the State Concert Agency, a government bureaucracy that reserved the right to determine which bands could legally perform in public places. Only bands that were officially registered by the agency could receive money for their shows, a ploy that allowed bureaucrats to weed out undesirable groups by choking off their income...
...lobby of Moscow's Hotel Ukraina, a dingy Stalin-era landmark, clerks who used to book reservations with paper chits now check guests in with a pair of Soviet-made computer terminals. Specialty stores that once tallied purchases on wooden abacuses have bypassed cash registers and gone directly to computers. And computers can now be found at the TASS news-wire service, at the offices of Aeroflot and at the government planning agency Gosplan...
There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
...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 so crucial to changing Soviet society...
Seen again from the air, Moscow is unchanged. The city squats as always on the steppes like an ungainly old hulk, beached and abandoned, its Stalin-era spires so many masts thrusting into the gloom, and the nearest sea hundreds of miles away. Fair warning, neo-Napoleons! Even with glasnost, perestroika and the Pepsi Revolution, Moscow the impregnable lives on, isolated and forbidding, a dour reminder of what it means to be Russian...