Word: parallelling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black market in goods and services has become so large that Sovietologists now call it a "parallel market," in a "second economy." According to Political Scientist Dimitri Simes of Georgetown University, "the ordinary Soviet citizen uses the parallel market on an almost daily basis...
Virtually every kind of stolen merchandise is available on the parallel market...
...from state-managed building repair crews. Some of these repairmen are highly skilled engineers who quadruple their salaries, tax free, by after-hours work. Simes observes that everyone who owns an auto-and there are now 15 million passenger cars on Soviet roads-is a permanent user of the parallel market. While it could take weeks to have a car repaired and months to obtain spare parts, affluent drivers can quickly get what they need by bribing mechanics and service-station attendants. A bottle of vodka is the minimum and usually compulsory bribe...
Even private education is available on the parallel market. Coaching of backward students and conducting cram courses for admission to universities have become big business for moonlighting teachers; their wages normally range from 100 to 145 rubles a month-lower than the 153-ruble wage of the industrial worker. A poll conducted at Moscow University has shown that 85% of freshmen in the math department had used private tutors to prepare for admission...
Modern scholars have noted one important detail here: the parallel between Kalypso's loom and the loom of Penelope, roughly corresponding to the grade on a paper and the grade on the final exam, respectively. There are two interpretations of the water: either it is Odysseus's exam, which he will overcome only with the help of Leukothea's magic veil (corresponding to present-day crib notes), or it is a symbol of Odysseus's knowledge, and thus the source of his consternation, "barren...