Word: papering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...colonnaded auditorium of the House of Physicians, other Muscovites listen transfixed to a recording of poet Anna Akhmatova reading her long- banned poem Requiem in a deep, rasping voice. When the melancholy cadences end, literary historian Lydia Chukovskaya, 82, recounts how she memorized the verse from scraps of paper that Akhmatova had handed her before the poet burned them in an ashtray...
...desirable jobs, but the nomenklatura fears that reform may also eliminate the perks -- special stores, food sources, even schools -- that make them the Soviet Union's pampered elite. Those privileges are a touchy matter. When Pravda published a letter from a reader complaining about nomenklatura perks, Ligachev chided the paper for admitting that the privileges even existed...
...lobby of Moscow's Hotel Ukraina, a dingy Stalin-era landmark, clerks who used to book reservations with paper chits now check guests in with a pair of Soviet-made computer terminals. Specialty stores that once tallied purchases on wooden abacuses have bypassed cash registers and gone directly to computers. And computers can now be found at the TASS news-wire service, at the offices of Aeroflot and at the government planning agency Gosplan...
...reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people." Just a few years ago, no officials would have dared utter such words except in intimate conversations with friends...
...find one. And to keep the Western employees sane, you have to fly them out of the country at least four times a year." Because employees feel deprived of their comforts, some companies provide allowances, so that personnel can import such hard-to- find items as toothpaste, fruit, toilet paper and fresh vegetables...