Word: lasting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Here we are! Hooray!" Those were modest words for a momentous achievement. They came in a radio message from a six-man team of adventurers and scientists that reached the South Pole last week after a 3,213-km (1,992-mile) trek across Antarctica by dogsled. The expedition was the first to reach the pole by dogsled since Roald Amundsen beat Robert Scott there 78 years ago. But impressive as the feat is, it marks only the midpoint of an even more ambitious journey: a 6,450-km (4,000-mile) campaign that would be the first dogsled trip...
...sneak preview of the latest Tom Clancy effulgence? Hardly. This frightening scenario of Soviet collapse, titled Nevozraschenets (The Non- Returnee), was published last June in Iskusstvo Kino, the official journal of the Soviet movie industry. Its appearance reflects a mood of unprecedented pessimism and self-doubt, in which intellectuals and political figures have been speculating somberly about the catastrophes that could befall the Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt...
Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...
...Soviet national catastrophe might take either of two forms: a "revolution from below" or a coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...
...Last week's narrow defeat of a Supreme Soviet motion to debate an end to one-party rule showed just how tenuous the authority of the Soviet Communist Party now is. Striking workers might bring about not only a collapse of power in Moscow but the snapping of links to the outlying republics. A wave of secessionism might then follow, with the probability of murderous ethnic strife in its wake...