Word: sovietizers
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...Physically and psychologically, the town is stuck in a strange twilight between the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the modern European Union. In Minsk, the capital 250 miles away, the government retains the sheen of its totalitarian past. In 2006, Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Soviet-era official who claims to have been the only member of the Belarus legislature to vote against the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, was elected to his third term as president. With his command of 84% of the vote and a tight leash on opposition parties, he has good reason to expect that he will...
...Ranina itself is a relic of the Soviet system that permitted private individuals to buy and sell small parcels of arable land at market prices. It consists of approximately 500 tiny homes, or dachas, densely packed onto a three-mile square grid, although there are no stores, churches, schools or communal structures of any kind. For decades, Russians have retreated to places like this on weekends and vacations to escape the oppression of tiny city apartments...
...Although taxes are levied on the properties, none of the revenue is spent locally; all of the money goes to Minsk. Nor would there be any local structure such as a town council or community board to spend tax revenues. In the old days, a rural soviet (committee) would have met regularly. But attendance was enforced, and everyone understood that the proceedings were largely meangingless. Nowadays, no one bothers...
...afford it," says a homeowner who gives her name only as Tanya, "it is that people do not believe that if they hand over some money, no matter how small, and no matter how positive the cause, that something will actually come of it." After seven decades of Soviet life and 13 years of Lukashenko, mistrust runs deep...
...Russian market or shooting on location for an international audience, Hollywood studios and talent are getting involved, keen to exploit local knowledge while helping to revive a system that once produced some of the world's finest films by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. Soviet cinema collapsed when state funding disappeared at the close of the communist period. A great bulk of filmmakers migrated to advertising and television, which adjusted more organically to capitalism. The result was a tattered film industry: in the mid-'90s, Russia produced little more than a dozen feature films per year. Mosfilm...