Word: samizdat
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...Burmese will have the opportunity to peruse the 194-page charter draft. Currently, official copies are available only at government-run bookstores - and they must be purchased. Samizdat versions are available, and some pro-democracy activists have been poring through the text to publicize what they contend are the myriad ways in which the constitution subverts true democratic principles. But even if the draft were widely available, the majority of Burma's 53 million mostly impoverished residents are hardly likely to sit down with a 15-chapter tome...
...grown poorer, the military has enriched itself through timber and natural-gas deals. In 2005, the ruling junta mysteriously moved the nation's capital from Rangoon to a new city called Naypyidaw, carved out of the jungle at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Last year, a samizdat video of Than Shwe's daughter getting married made the rounds in Rangoon; Burmese were shocked by the number of jewels dripping from her body - and by wedding gifts valued at an estimated $50 million...
...hardships are made more unbearable by a widening wealth gap. The country's military leaders are enjoying ever more ostentatious lives, their wallets fattened by gas-pipeline deals with neighbors China, India and Thailand. A samizdat video circulating in Rangoon shows junta chief Than Shwe's daughter getting married in a lavish ceremony. The couple reportedly received millions of dollars in wedding gifts--in a nation where the average annual per capita income is just $225. More appalling, the junta spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2005 to build a brand-new capital city. Yet today Naypyidaw...
...country's military leaders are leading ever more ostentatious lives, their wallets fattened by gas-pipeline deals with neighbors China, Thailand and India. The ruling class cruises around in luxury cars and cloisters itself in compounds ablaze with lights, even as most Burmese face constant electricity rationing. A samizdat video circulating in Rangoon shows junta chief Than Shwe's daughter, decked out in jewels, getting married in a lavish ceremony - this in a country where the average annual per capita income is just $225. Even more galling, the junta turned a thicket of jungle into a brand new administrative capital...
...party positions and started him on the road that led to the 1991 White House confrontation. While no official text of the speech was published at the time, presumably because the Politburo was nervous about revealing such frank criticism from one of its own members, various versions circulated in samizdat as well as the Western press. According to one report Yeltsin had voiced widely held popular grievances about ordinary Russians' standard of living. "Comrades," he began, "I find it hard to explain to a worker why, in the 70th year of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he still...