Word: grazhdanskaya
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Long before the demise of the Soviet Union, Russians learned to dismiss as absurd the civil defense training courses imposed on them at school and work. They refer to the courses as grob, taken from the first two letters of the words for civil defense -- grazhdanskaya oborona. Translation of grob: coffin. The cynicism was justified. In 1988 an accidental air-raid alert in the industrial city of Perm sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for safety. As a test of civil defense, the accident proved a disaster. Perm residents found many shelters locked, flooded or infested with mosquitoes...
...perhaps grazhdanskaya voina -- civil war. That certainly was how the hostilities were seen by the 13,000 Armenians who were forced to flee their homes in the embattled southern republic of Azerbaijan last week, first crossing the Caspian Sea by ferry to Turkmenistan, then flying on to Moscow or the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Many of those who landed in Moscow huddled around the building that houses Armenia's representational office, transforming the quiet street into an encampment of shock, grief and rage. As a refugee put it, "What civilized country would allow its own people to be murdered...
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