Word: post-soviet
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Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation...
...their subjects, instead seeming to focus on the minute details briefly before moving to the next topic. Dvortsevoy, who came to filmmaking after aviation engineering, tries to minimize his presence in his own films, instead giving a voice to the people scraping out an existence in the margins of post-Soviet society. His press statement about “Highway” sums up his philosophy of filmmaking: “I’ve come to understand that it’s silly to describe what is not possible to describe: the beauty and mystery of everyday life...
...state rapidly privatized over 10,000 trading, service and industrial firms. As often happened in post-Soviet countries, the best of these firms were sold off to insiders, shoring up the power bases of important clans. But the biggest economic engine was oil, and that required outside help. Says Mikhail Dorofeyev, public relations director of KazMunaiGaz: "We offered oil to the West in exchange for technology, know-how and money...
...encourage budding businesses," says Ulf Wokurka, a former Deutsche Bank director and now cfo of Samruk, Kazakhstan's holding company that runs such giants as KazTelecom and oil and natural gas firm KazMunaiGaz. The state rapidly privatized over 10,000 trading, service and industrial firms. As often happened in post-Soviet countries, the best of these firms were sold off to insiders, shoring up the power bases of important clans. But the biggest economic engine was oil, and that required outside help. Says Mikhail Dorofeyev, public relations director of KazMunaiGaz: "We offered oil to the West in exchange for technology...
...Service, The Kind Angel of Death, in which a colonel complains that a lack of funding is forcing the former kgb to "use the passive help of our citizens ... Unfortunately, none of these assistants of ours ever managed to assist us without our help." Kurkov captures such absurdities of post-Soviet existence with characteristic black humor. Born in St. Petersburg, Kurkov grew up in Kiev, where his parents moved when he was 2. He learned Ukrainian, majored in foreign languages at college, and now writes essays in Russian, Ukrainian, English and German. He also speaks Japanese, his fluency in which...