Word: pravda
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...Soviet press, meanwhile, lambasted some aspects of the relief effort as bungled and inept. Pravda, the Communist Party daily, said that because of a lack of cranes "seconds and hours are being lost -- that means lives." It complained that for each Soviet searcher "we have about ten observers who give advice rather than clear up the rubble." Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya asked, "Why does it happen that many families are still living out in the open though there is an abundance of tents?" Some of the homeless spend their nights huddled over bonfires. Even a Communist Party commission report lashed...
...people apparently viewed the disaster as an opportunity to steal. Pravda said more than $400,000 in pilfered goods had been recovered and 150 looters had been arrested. But 20,000 tents bound for Leninakan disappeared. To prevent looting, a midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew was imposed throughout Armenia, and troops patrolled the streets of Leninakan. TASS reported that a man was arrested in Kirovakan for stripping watches and earrings from the dead. Soviet soldiers were seen removing boots from the dead and trying them on for size. "We shouldn't hide the fact that all kinds of scum...
...blocks there is too little cement but more than enough sand? This means the cement was stolen. By whom?" Leonid Bibin, deputy chairman of the state building committee, launched an investigation into why so many of the more recently built homes collapsed, and said criminal charges could be brought. Pravda said the poor construction, like so many other shortcomings in the Soviet system, could be attributed to the "period of stagnation," which has become the popular reference for the regime of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev...
...region affected by the quake is interlaced with small faults in the earth's crust and has been shaken by dozens of serious tremors this century. "Where were the seismologists, the architects and the construction workers that drafted and built the houses that fell apart like matchboxes?" Komsomolskaya Pravda asked. Many new nine-story prefabricated panel buildings, Pravda noted, simply collapsed into heaps of rubble that became "common graves for many...
...Soviets, aided by an outpouring of worldwide concern, sought to shoulder the burden of their great tragedy. It was bitter irony that a leader who had just traveled half a world to talk of peace should return to a land that was, in the words of a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent, "like coming into a war, a cruel and modern...