Word: petersburg
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Large urban centers like Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg (known as Sverdlovsk until this year) in the Urals have been hardest hit. With supplies of milk and meat down 10% or more from last year, big-city larders are perilously close to empty. Shoppers have few alternatives short of breeding hens on their apartment roofs or rabbits on their balconies. They can wait in long lines to buy whatever meager items city officials provide or to purchase scarce goods like meat at inflated prices in the free markets or from street vendors. Explains Natalya, an assistant director in a Moscow...
...cargo planes began delivering 300,000 lbs. of surplus food to Moscow and St. Petersburg last week, adding to the stream of emergency supplies pouring in from the West. Such timely help will certainly be welcome, but it cannot solve the long-term problems of a country that simply did not learn how to feed itself during seven decades of communist rule. Nor can it ease the bitterness of many citizens who, though they never enjoyed abundance, remember how they once lived in a superpower rather than a patchwork quilt of fledgling states reduced to begging for help. If Yeltsin...
...foreign policies of its sovereign members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk...
...scarcity. So far, scarcity is winning. Severe shortages of fuel closed half the country's airports and halted domestic flights. Banks were running out of hard currency as citizens struggled with a runaway ruble. Factories called stoppages, services inexplicably ceased. Food was critically short in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukraine and Belorussia got Yeltsin to postpone until Jan. 2 a decree freeing many Russian prices, which was supposed to take effect Monday. The delay only touched off a new binge of panic buying; longer lines than ever snaked through Moscow's streets. While the politicians bickered over the shape...
Some help is on the way. Secretary of State James Baker,taking care not to side with either the dying union or the commonwealth aborning, announced that U.S. Air Force planes will begin flying food into Moscow, St. Petersburg and other hungry cities, using military rations left over from the Persian Gulf war. He also proposed that all nations interested in sending aid to the old U.S.S.R. hold a conference in early January to coordinate who would put up how much. But a senior British diplomat grumbled that the conference "should have been held three months...