Word: leningraders
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...streetlamps flicker on in front of Leningrad's palatial city hall and a blanket of luminescent mist settles over the gilded dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral, just across the square. Night and fog come early now to the far northern city, built on islands in the Neva River. But the workday is far from over for Leningrad Mayor Anatoli Sobchak. In his elegant second-floor office, once used by the Czars, he reflects on the problems of this metropolis of 5 million, famed as the cradle of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. "I feel as if I am wrapped...
...wields power in the country's second largest city is the classic political outsider. Sobchak was a little-known professor of economic law at Leningrad State University until he was elected last year to the Soviet parliament. Then almost overnight, his witty and acerbic exchanges with Mikhail Gorbachev on legal fine points won him national prominence. When Sobchak became chairman of the Leningrad city council last May, the move was hailed as a victory for radical democrats opposed to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. Sobchak is still the most admired politician in his native city -- with a popularity...
Sobchak's troubles illustrate what has gone wrong with the grass-roots revolution last March that swept Communists out of power in industrial centers across the U.S.S.R. He took office eager to press ahead with plans to create a free economic zone in Leningrad that would attract Western capital. But the mayor's initial enthusiasm has been tempered by bruising battles with an unruly city council and entrenched bureaucrats, who are unwilling to let go of the real levers of power...
...last week on the front page of Pravda, the Communist Party daily, posed the question haunting all Soviet consumers as they prepare for the coming winter: ARE WE THREATENED WITH HUNGER? President Mikhail Gorbachev has roundly dismissed what he calls "conjectures of a coming famine." In industrial centers like Leningrad, however, local authorities plan to introduce wide-scale rationing to avert the worst consumer shortages since the end of World...
...decades Revolution Day on Nov. 7 has been the Soviet holiday of holidays, celebrating the 1917 dawn of the Communist empire in a pageant of regimented unity. But the observances this week seem likely to symbolize something very different -- where they are held at all. Officials in Moscow and Leningrad have criticized the traditional military parades as anachronistic wastes of money; parliamentarians in Latvia want rites honoring "victims of Communist terror"; authorities in Lvov in the western Ukraine resolved to ignore the anniversary altogether. Even after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered Moscow and other cities to hold the parades, some...