Word: sogra
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...years ago, the visit of the regional Communist Party chief--in those days a figure of almost unimaginable power and privilege--would have been a momentous occasion for Sogra, a village located 580 miles northeast of Moscow. Earlier this month, however, when former regional first secretary Yuri Guskov (now a member of the Russian parliament and a big man in the diamond business) came to campaign for Communist presidential candidate Gennadi Zyuganov, he drew a crowd generously estimated...
Guskov's visit is something of a joke among village officials here, who say they voted for Boris Yeltsin. Nevertheless, it was the only sign offered to Sogra that a life-and-death struggle for the Russian presidency was under way. No representative of any of the other nine candidates came, no one put up posters, no one delivered flyers. "Why would anyone come here?" asked the chairman of the village council, Vladimir Romanov. "The nearest paved road is 100 km away...
...committee to re-elect the President. "But we didn't get around to it," said the head teacher, Nikolai Lychev. Anyway, he added, the regional Yeltsin campaign headquarters in Arkhangel'sk did not send any materials till the day before the vote. By then, campaigning was prohibited. Yeltsin won Sogra and the surrounding villages anyway. He received 538 votes; Zyuganov came in second with 378, followed by General Alexander Lebed with 262 and Vladimir Zhirinovsky a distant fourth...
...Sogra was settled in the 1400s, and many of its inhabitants speak a centuries-old dialect of Russian. Places like this one, home to perhaps a quarter of Russia's population, are popularly known as the glubinka--the depths of the countryside. And like other such villages, Sogra is in crisis. Ten births--and 50 deaths--have been recorded this year. Vodka is one of the main killers. Of the 2,900 people in the area, 1,100 are pensioners. Forty percent of the working-age residents do not have jobs. The village's main employer, a logging combine, went...
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