Word: localities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...week before our arrival in Tambov, the drivers on two trolleybus lines had gone on strike, protesting the dreadful condition of the roads Tambovskaya Pravda, the local Communist Party daily, devoted the front page to a regional party committee meeting, examining the fate of those repressed under Stalin Elections had been held for a new factory director In the town of Michurinsk, 40 miles to the northwest, an ecology rally had been organized, drawing more than 1,000 people...
...jotted down these facts in our notebooks, and many more: the founding of a local branch of the anti-Stalinist movement, Memorial, the first reported case of aids in Tambov, the first Soviet-Finnish joint construction project, rumors that racketeers were moving in on local cooperatives. Late-night television had even come to Tambov, something we Muscovites still lacked. Then there were those telling words from a worker on the regional party committee: "We decided to do away with special food packages for ourselves so that there would not be talk about us having privileges that other workers...
There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror...
Public Prosecutor Vyaceslav Kuchmin told us that about 100 local instances of Stalinist illegalities had already been reviewed. Not that Kuchmin was in complete agreement with those critics in Moscow who he felt "showed only the negative sides of our history" and drew too many "unfair comparisons" with the U.S. "We are the same people as we were then," he explained. "We can't just exchange this nation for another...
...trouble understanding what the argument was all about until members of the opposition showed us four issues of their unofficial publication, called Sodeistviye, meaning assistance. According to an editorial in the first issue, Sodeistviye presented news that was not covered by the local party newspaper, "everything that Tambov citizens talk about in lines, while catching a smoke at the factory, in college corridors and in family kitchens...