Word: fedorov
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When Andrei Fedorov ran a state-owned restaurant in Moscow, he made 190 rubles ($304) a month even if no one came to dinner. "I didn't care if we had customers or not," he says with a shrug. "I didn't care if the service was good." Two years ago, he started his own now popular bistro, Kropotkinskaya 36, just off Sadovaya Ring Road in the Soviet capital. Fedorov pays himself about 850 rubles ($1,360) a month, nearly four times the average Soviet salary. But he works twice as hard as he ever did as a government employee...
...Fedorov is far from it. Last year his restaurant earned a profit of 600,000 rubles on revenues of 2 million rubles. Some of Fedorov's fellow Soviet citizens feel threatened by his success. For example, he wants to buy a farm to ensure himself a supply of quality produce and meat. But fighting his way through a bureaucratic maze to get the requisite permits is a thankless task. "Rather than create opportunities for real competition," he says, "these ministries are trying to tie our hands. I go to the ministry, and they say what I want...
...Fedorov's experience of fortune mixed with frustration is typical of the thriving entrepreneurs -- capitalists without the name -- who exemplify a key but controversial part of Mikhail Gorbachev's economic-reform program, the cooperative movement. In 1987 Gorbachev proposed the formation of privately owned, profit-oriented 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...
...Soviet space experts learned, they added little to Gaga's own story. They published only the bare statistics of the flight: it lasted 108 minutes, of which 89 minutes were actually spent in orbit; the rest was climbing to orbit and descent to the earth. Academician Evgeny Fedorov, one of the big brains of the Soviet space program, spoke briefly about the descent. It was accomplished with retrorockets, which slowed the Vostok and brought it down into a "braking zone" of gradually thickening air. There the ship was heated by friction and suffered tremendous strain, but the braking effect...
...Fedorov's account suggested that the cosmonaut landed inside his space capsule, but according to other sources in Russia, Major Gagarin parachuted out of the capsule before it hit the ground. Space Scientist Nikolai Gurovsky said: "The cosmonaut came down smoothly in a glade near a field. Landing on his feet, without even tumbling, he walked up to the people...