Word: krokodil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grain purchases from abroad, it is filled with complaints about the troubles of farmers. Many articles lament the woeful state of Soviet farm machinery and the lack of spares. By one count, 450 harvesters in three Novosibirsk districts alone are laid up at present for want of parts. Krokodil, the satirical weekly, recently ran a cartoon showing a farm worker running a lottery to get a spare part for his thresher. Pravda complained that harvesters manufactured at the Krasnoyarsk plant in Siberia are so sloppily assembled that more than half have to be fixed at farm repair shops...
...pilfer the factory's stocks or get too drunk to show up. At present, a Soviet worker produces only half as much as his U.S. counterpart and a Russian farmer one-fifth as much. Shoddy work habits are a regular target for the acerbic cartoonists of Krokodil, the Soviet humor magazine. The workers, in turn, joke bitterly about Communism's unfulfilled promise. What is the difference between an American and a Russian fairy story? goes one joke. The American story begins, "Once upon a time there was ..." The Russian one starts, "Some day there will...
...working on the development of an electronic traffic-control system. Meanwhile, however, consumer demands for cars are skyrocketing. Russians are so auto-hungry that they will pay twice the list price to those who win new cars in the state-run lottery. A cartoon in the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil shows a swaddled infant in a carriage, howling, "I want a car!" at the sight of the new Zhiguli. Even when the Togliatti plant reaches full production, it is scarcely likely to meet the demand. According to one estimate, even if Russia should succeed in producing 7,000,000 cars...