Word: kremlins
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...which is Russian for big. The company offered majestic productions of such epics as Prokofiev's War and Peace and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, plus that Russian national favorite, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. That was the monolithic age of Brezhnev, after all, and the Bolshoi had long been the Kremlin's chief cultural weapon; the party bureaucracy decreed the choices of repertory, casting, even stage sets. The results were as strong as a tank, and just as subtle. Still, American audiences were impressed by the quality of the spectacle, no less than by the company's rich history and exoticism...
When it came time for the Bolshoi to fly West, the Kremlin paid nothing, at least not directly. The company wheedled Aeroflot into providing two airliners, and got the Defense Ministry to transport some 750 tons of sets and scenery. The Elbim Bank, a new institution for entrepreneurial investments, put up a little cash to help out. "The Ministry of Culture asked me to take a couple of their officials along," Kokonin recalls, with an impresario's smile. "I felt so happy to tell them that I wouldn...
...crucial step toward political sovereignty is liberation of the economy from the all-but-worthless ruble. The Balts have arranged to print their own money in the West, but they have not dared put it into circulation since that might provoke a full-scale crackdown by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Ukraine is about to start distributing specially stamped rubles that can be spent only inside the republic, where goods are cheaper and more plentiful than elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian ruble will thus be, de facto, a separate currency. In addition, the parliament is moving to privatize property...
...Yeltsin will have to produce results rather than just carp about the Kremlin. The future of nascent democracy not only in Russia but in many of the other 14 Soviet republics may ride on his success. His demonstrated popularity may boost his chances of negotiating with the Kremlin and the other republics a new union treaty that would give his government greater autonomy. That in turn might increase Yeltsin's ability to actually create the private-property, free-market economy he envisions, and to strip away most of the authority still exercised by Communist Party bureaucrats. Even then, however, Yeltsin...
...advocacy of a federal tax system under which the central government would collect at least some revenues directly. He was trying to steer them away from proposals, primarily from Yeltsin, for a plan in which the republics collect all the money and pass on a portion to the Kremlin...