Word: levelling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Translated to a personal level, this means that day-to-day life in the Soviet Union is as difficult as ever. Not only are big consumer items like refrigerators and washing machines in short supply -- the average wait to buy the cheapest Soviet car is seven years -- but staples of everyday life are also scarce. Long lines snake into the street for such ordinary items as sausage, rice, coffee and candy...
...next stage of perestroika will probably be even harder than the latest. For market incentives to work, prices will have to be decontrolled -- a frightening prospect given the pent-up inflationary pressures. Rents and the prices of meat, bread and milk have been kept at the same level for decades; if decontrolled, they would be likely to rocket. Gorbachev understands the challenge. "Socialist markets cannot be formed without price reform," he told a party meeting in February. But having reached that daunting precipice, he blinked. Rents and basic food prices, he promised, will not be raised for at least...
...more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet...
...often attacked by Pamyat toughs who are the Soviet version of skinheads. Soviet Jews are concerned that Pamyat's modest membership of several thousand is an inadequate index of its power. Says Boris Kelman, a Leningrad refusenik: "Pamyat is not only protected but controlled by people at a high level in the party. It gets support from...
...almost any other country, the sight of a few computers would hardly seem worth noting. But in a society predicated on the control of information -- and, perhaps more important, on centralized decision making -- the placing of information processors in the hands of factory managers, middle-level bureaucrats, educators, journalists and regional planners is very big news. "There's a struggle taking place over the control of information," says Loren Graham, a Soviet-science watcher at M.I.T. "The debate is whether to make personal computers available to the general public or to restrict access by price or institutional control...