Word: movement
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even with its growing popularity, the fitness movement still faces major hurdles. For one thing, it is difficult to maintain a healthy diet because of the country's chronic food shortages. Fresh fruit and vegetables are scarce, even in summer, and bread, sausage and potatoes are the staples of daily life. Moreover, Soviet doctors do not think the government has given enough attention or resources to the drive for good health. Dr. Vorobyev, who has written a best-selling book called Components of Health, advocates a "national campaign for fitness" and is working on a plan to set up kiosks...
...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...
Shinkaretsky's voice is a lonely one, since the consumer movement is just awakening in the Soviet Union. Besides a small group of activists in the capital, there are fledgling consumer groups in Leningrad and Kiev. A draft law was introduced in Moscow in February that would allow customers to exchange shoddy goods, but Shinkaretsky is not impressed. He wants to start a consumer journal and set up a council that tests cars, stereos and, particularly, television sets, a fire hazard because they have a tendency to explode...
Fedorov's experience of fortune mixed with frustration is typical of the thriving entrepreneurs -- capitalists without the name -- who exemplify a key but controversial part of Mikhail Gorbachev's economic-reform program, the cooperative movement. In 1987 Gorbachev proposed the formation of privately owned, profit-oriented cooperative enterprises to supplement and even compete with state-run projects. The primary goal of his proposal, which in many respects echoed Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy of 1921, was to inject vitality into the U.S.S.R.'s laggard consumer goods and services industries. In addition, the new co-ops would pay taxes...
Like Fedorov's restaurant, the co-op movement has taken off -- but it faces a bumpy ride. Although they now account for only about 1% of the country's economy, the 48,000 Soviet co-ops (there were only a handful a year ago) employ some 770,000 workers. The services they offer read like a Yellow Pages directory: animal grooming, auto repairs, computer maintenance, hairstyling, plumbing, translating -- even operating pay toilets...