Word: sovietize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days - a title whose meaning becomes clear only about halfway through the film - is Christian Mungiu's startlingly good drama set in 1987, during the end of Romania's Ceausescu regime. The burdens of Soviet-style dictatorship have imposed a gray pall on the country, putting most of the citizenry in a perpetually sour mood. The black market, for shampoo and Kent cigarettes, is on each street corner, in every college dormitory. That's where we meet Otilia (Annamaria Marinca), a smart, illusionless student, and her pretty, mopey roommate Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). Gabita is despondent...
That is what you call a power play. Be it a scuffle with foreign consortiums on Russian soil, or in pricing battles with Russia's neighbors, Gazprom wins very much in style of the proverbial Soviet Army steamroller: inefficient, unwieldy and mismanaged, it crushes foes by its mammoth weight and monopoly gas supply. In January 2006, for instance, when the Ukrainians balked at Gazprom's price, Medvedev turned off the taps. Pay or freeze, he told them. They paid...
Capturing Beltransgaz, Medvedev says, was nothing less than restoring the status quo--the Unified Gas Supply System of Russia (UGSS) that supplied the old Soviet empire. "One of the mistakes that our so-called reformers made was having the UGSS sadistically dismembered," he explains to TIME, sitting back, pin-striped and relaxed, in his techno-style office that dominates the ninth floor of the posh new Gazpromexport headquarters in downtown Moscow. His disdain of the architects of Russia's early market reform is de rigueur for top executives under President Vladimir Putin. Medvedev isn't finished. He says Gazprom wants...
Medvedev is the paragon of a top corporate-statist-technocrat executive for the new Russian corporate state. Prior to 2002, when he came to head Gazpromexport, Medvedev had never been involved with natural gas. Born in the far eastern island of Sakhalin to the family of a Soviet air force officer, he left the island in his teens. In 1978, upon graduation from the fabled Phystech, Moscow's Institute of Physics and Technology--Russia's answer to M.I.T.--Medvedev, who majored in automated control systems, got a job with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO...
...ROCOR's American clergy insist that they retain administrative independence over their churches even as they recognize the Moscow Patriarch as their Head. Filatov says that the ROCOR has "about as much [independence] as Eastern Europe's 'people's democracies' had in the Soviet bloc." One of the first tests of the new union will be in the Holy Land, where the ROCOR maintains religious properties - and has had run-ins with representatives of the Moscow patriarchate in the past. In 1997, for example, Yasser Arafat forcibly turned over the only Christian church in Hebron, run by the ROCOR...