Word: sovietizers
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...obsession with a lost love while a folk troop performed a centuries-old Norwegian mountain dance consisting of backflips and exaggerated push-ups. "In Russia, they like nostalgia and melancholy," he said, explaining why he thinks his wistful tune appealed to millions of voters in Russia and former Soviet states. That his folksy ditty channeled the sounds of Vladivostok more than Oslo probably didn't hurt. (See Eurovision's most controversial moments...
Spending Big The good news from Germany is that lots of money buys lots of stuff. Halle today has a new network of fast highways and rail tracks, a renovated historic city center, ultramodern water-treatment plants, a technology center on the site of a former Soviet army base just outside town, and - most needed of all - thousands of solid new jobs in a rebuilt industrial sector that has become home to U.S. firms such as computer maker Dell and Dow Chemical. Mayor Szabados waves to a corner of her office. Leaning up against the wall there are two dozen...
...just how high expectations became on a quick tour of the Neustadt residential district on the western edge of Halle. Neustadt is a depressing example of Soviet-style urban planning, with row upon row of gray concrete blocks, built in the 1970s to house some of the 40,000 people who worked at the chemical factories that once dominated the local economy. Firms with names such as Buna and Leuna belched pollutants into Halle's air while churning out products whose quality lagged far behind western examples...
There's no doubt this public spending produced some results. The U.S. semiconductor firm AMD, for example, was planning to build a new plant in Ireland. In 1995, however, it switched to the Dresden area - once a high-tech region for the whole Soviet bloc - where it now employs about 2,000 people. Similarly, on the edge of Halle's Neustadt, in a brand-new technology center built on the site of the former Soviet army base, Katja Heppe pulls the claws of a snow crab out of a plastic bag. She's 29, a biotechnology researcher who specializes...
...Others believe the problem lies in the upbringing of children born after the fall of the Soviet Union. "Students today are more interested in money and dancing," says Yuri Bogomolov, 79, a former scientist at a Soviet-era aerospace lab. "We have a lot of patriotism, but the U.S. has a lot of money [to put into its space program]," he adds as he watches a clip from White Sun of the Desert, a Soviet action-adventure film that cosmonauts traditionally - and superstitiously - watch before blasting off, ever since Gagarin watched it and returned alive from his first space flight...