Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Upon returning to Moscow in 1944 after a seven-year absence, the American diplomat George Kennan was struck by the enigma of an empire both yearning for its rightful place in the modern world and clinging to the enfeebling insularity of its past. "The Anglo-Saxon instinct is to attempt to smooth away contradictions," he wrote. "The Russian tends to deal only in extremes, and he is not particularly concerned to reconcile them. To him, contradiction is a familiar thing. It is the essence of Russia...
Contradiction has also become the essence of its second revolution, the radical crusade by Mikhail Gorbachev to create nothing less than a new Soviet Union. In fits and starts, using such hybrids as socialist markets and one- party pluralism, he has directed one of the most transfixing spectacles of modern times: an encrusted political and economic system being brought, stumbling and blinking in amazement, into the light of a new era. In the tradition of Peter the Great, who opened up Russia to the West almost 300 years ago to rescue it from backwardness, Gorbachev is trying to transform, neither...
...past 70 years, a new man has been created who is obedient and easily frightened," says the poet Bulat Okudzhava, a veteran Soviet-reform advocate. "What has been created over decades cannot be undone in a day." Energizing an empire of 285 million people and turning it into a modern economy ranks among the most daunting tasks of modern times, as audacious as Deng Xiaoping's Four Modernizations or Franklin Roosevelt's creation of a new social welfare state...
LONELY WOMAN SEARCHING FOR A LIFE COMPANION. Preferably a single Moscow male, but not this one: he insults, robs, then leeches on the lonely 43-year-old who placed the ad. Director Vyacheslav Krishtofovich locates Soviet malaise in this wry fable of a modern Soviet woman desperately seeking Comrade Right...
Assistant Director of Dining Services Administration Dale M. Hennessey says she is sometimes frustrated when students criticize the Union without knowing how much planning and preparation is necessary to run a modern college dining hall...