Word: nikolais
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...exposed how difficult rebuilding the Soviet economy will be. The obstacles are greater, the situation more dire and the fixes more fundamental than even Gorbachev suspected four years ago. "Frankly speaking, comrades, we have underestimated the extent and gravity of the deformations," he told a Party Conference last year. Nikolai Shmelev, one of the country's radical economic gadflies, has put it more vividly: "We are now like a seriously ill man who, after a long time in bed, takes his first step with the greatest degree of difficulty and finds to his horror that he has almost forgotten...
...swords-into-plowshares effort has produced some quirky situations. For example, the Ministry for Medium-Machine Building, which is responsible for building nuclear weapons, has been given the job of modernizing the dairy industry. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov disclosed last month that the Moscow Aviation Factory will soon produce pasta...
...state propagandists, whose mission it is to turn out the unending stream of statues of Lenin (with benign and resolute features that grow more Asiatic the further east they go) for public places from Minsk to Irkutsk. Many an unofficial artist finds himself in the predicament of Nikolai Filatov, whose large canvases -- a fervent compost of '50s-style abstract expressionism and broken-up cubofuturist planes -- are beginning to sell in the West, so he has hard currency but nowhere to paint. To get studio space in Moscow on an official basis, you must belong to the Artists Union...
...sense that the artist has a prophetic mission in society has haunted Russian culture since the 19th century. That heavy burden crushed novelist Nikolai Gogol, who was never able to equal his masterpiece Dead Souls. It ultimately led other writers, like Leo Tolstoy, away from art and into dogmatic polemics. The weight can be felt today on the Soviet artistic community. But the essential paradox of glasnost is that when cultural leaders raise their voices, they can no longer be heard above the excited babble of an entire nation learning to speak for the first time...
...People understand that educational change is necessary, but the success or failure of this is linked to the success or failure of perestroika," said Dr. Nikolai D. Nikandrov, who is general secretary of the presidium of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences--roughly the equivalent to the U.S. Education Department...