Word: russianness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Against all odds, belief has been preserved through ancient rites and modern- day courage. Russian Orthodoxy and, even more, Judaism still suffer serious limitations. Nonetheless, as glasnost penetrates everyday life, believers are starting to enjoy wider freedoms than at any other time since the atheistic persecutions were launched during the 1920s...
Galina Boyko, principal of School No. 32 in Moscow, was teaching Russian literature to a class of 13-year-olds when a boy shot his hand into the air and asked about man's need for religion. Boyko, a 32-year veteran of the classroom, was understandably startled: religion has long been taboo in Soviet schools. But instead of avoiding the issue, she led her students through a 30- minute debate on the universal search for faith. "Before school reform, parents would have come to me, frightened that religion had even come up," Boyko said. "Now no one is surprised...
...abandoned, its Stalin-era spires so many masts thrusting into the gloom, and the nearest sea hundreds of miles away. Fair warning, neo-Napoleons! Even with glasnost, perestroika and the Pepsi Revolution, Moscow the impregnable lives on, isolated and forbidding, a dour reminder of what it means to be Russian...
...change has its price, though. Gaping cracks have opened in the wall of social "order" that once comforted the Russian psyche and justified Soviet ideology. Organized crime is so active that Mafia has become commonplace in Russian patois. The homeless are more obvious too, including provincials who have traveled to Moscow to buy or trade for food and must spend the night huddled in drafty railway stations. Elsewhere, gaudy hookers and teenage toughs prowl pedestrian tunnels, and beggars -- old women, mostly -- hold out quavering hands for kopecks. Black marketeers hustle even in Red Square, and on a green fence near...
Evidently Mikhail Gorbachev is willing to tolerate capitalist-style "contradictions" in his attempt to fuel economic reform with a dose of democracy. In any case, the heavy Soviet lid has been lifted, and the voices from inside the box -- above all, the voices of ever resilient Russian intellectualism -- are being heard in ways and forums unimaginable 20 years ago. If the democratic experiment has so far failed to improve the economy, it has radically altered the arts and the mass media...