Word: germanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thirds. The slowdown is the result of Porsche's overreliance on the American market, which absorbed about 60% of the company's production in 1986. But 1987 sales slowed to a crawl because of the stock-market crash and the decline of the dollar against the West German mark...
...long after the turmoil over collectivization died down in the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union was hit by the second trauma of Gorbachev's boyhood: the Nazi invasion. Mikhail was eleven years old when German tanks rumbled into nearby Stavropol at the start of what became the Stalingrad campaign. Hitler's troops stayed in the area for almost six months before being driven out by the Red Army. In all probability, though, the Nazis would not have bothered to occupy a village as small as Privolnoye, so Gorbachev seems to have escaped the worst rigors of the war. Only...
...twice a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds. Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar. The favorite diversion was foreign movies, most of them captured by the Red Army from German forces and shown in the "culture club" on the main floor. Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan movies were most popular. After one such epic show, the Stromynka hostel would resound with jungle whoops by the students...
Geography gave Gorbachev a mighty assist too. Christian Schmidt-Hauer, a West German journalist and biographer, observes that if Gorbachev had been party chief in, say, Murmansk in the far north, he would never have become General Secretary. But in Stavropol Krai, he was on hand to welcome top Moscow officials who came to the local spas at Mineralnye Vody and Kislovodsk for vacations and medical treatment. They found their host unusual in several respects. Says Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev: "A regional party first secretary who was intelligent and congenial would have been considered untypical. If Gorbachev had yelled, sworn...
...author, "contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge." Some jobs brought a prisoner an added ration of soup, perhaps the difference between starvation and survival. Levi absolves the sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, lice checkers and bed smoothers, those "who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square." Mercy is more strained for the Kapos, who were in charge of barracks and work details and whose own lives frequently depended on the ferocity they displayed toward their fellow prisoners. Throughout the Reich, the Nazi system spawned flunkies of almost opera...