Word: specializations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HAVE YOU GOT A LICENSE TO OPERATE THAT STAPLER? A U.S. firm that wanted to install photocopiers was told to obtain a special permit from the local fire department. When the same company tried to order typewriters, recalls its office manager, "the Soviets said, 'We can't get those. We'll do that next year...
...WORD MEANING LEVERAGED BUYOUT? Drawing up a contract that is precisely equivalent in two languages, English and Russian, can be a mind- bending exercise. One problem: there are no words in the Russian language for many Western business terms. Michael Bonsignore, president of Honeywell International, took special care in preparing contracts for the equipment that his company is providing for four Soviet fertilizer plants. Says he: "We translated our English documents into Russian, then had someone else translate them back into English to make sure that we were really saying to them exactly what we wanted...
...first Soviet-Finnish joint construction project, rumors that racketeers were moving in on local cooperatives. Late-night television had even come to Tambov, something we Muscovites still lacked. Then there were those telling words from a worker on the regional party committee: "We decided to do away with special food packages for ourselves so that there would not be talk about us having privileges that other workers...
Lunch at the Michurinsk factory proved to be one of those seemingly commonplace occurrences that actually signifies a great deal about perestroika. We did not eat in a separate executive dining room, or in a side room at a nearby restaurant reserved for the special few, but in a lunch hall where everybody ate together: factory director and lathe operator, shop floor manager and watchman...
This may have seemed quite normal for John, but it was evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist! This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great indignation...