Word: startingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...breed a new class of entrepreneurs, Gorbachev has allowed individuals to start cooperatives and share the profits. At first the program was limited mainly to high-visibility services such as taxis and cafes. Now more than 2 million people are employed in co-ops and private businesses. Privately operated pay toilets are set up all over Moscow. But most co-ops are still harassed by reform-resistant bureaucrats and have trouble securing permits and supplies...
Reaching beyond the country's borders, Gorbachev has attempted to start joint ventures with foreign investors. The Soviets have proved flexible: the original plan, which insisted on majority Soviet ownership, has been revised to accommodate the demands of Western companies. Last Thursday at a Kremlin ceremony, executives of a consortium of six U.S. firms -- including Chevron, Eastman Kodak and Johnson & Johnson -- signed an agreement for as many as 25 joint ventures involving about $10 billion over the next 20 years. Although the agreement specified ways that profits could be taken out of the Soviet Union in hard currency...
...Start with the happy ending. Like a song escaping from jaws long wired shut, the political voice of Soviet films is suddenly loud and clear. Did we say loud? Listen to the rock music that carpets the sound tracks. It drowns out everything but the angry shouts of the teen heroes, who sleep around and do drugs while aiming to be an amalgam of Elvis and Che. The revealing documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? portrays a generation given to graffiti and hooliganism. "I don't think about what will happen to me," says one young man, spiked hair...
...month from concerts, nearly 15 times the Soviet average wage and more than twice the take-home pay of Mikhail Gorbachev. (Says Sukachev: "If I had his house and his car, he could have my 3,000.") Still, success has its problems. "It's really dangerous when people start to praise you for doing the things they used to slam you for," he notes. The band now risks losing the special edge to its sound that developed from the tension of fighting for the right to play its music...
...What really gets to a Soviet in America is not the fancy clothes or mammoth cars. It's the supermarkets. You can go crazy at the start, the middle and the end. There are meat counters 200 to 300 yards long, with sausages as plentiful as raindrops, so many you keep bumping into them. That's the moment when Soviet tourists get weak at the knees and begin to feel queasy, but they refuse offers to be helped out for a breath of fresh air. The fruit-and- vegetable section is personally devastating. Avocados, papayas, kiwis, some kind of citrus...