Word: sverdlovsk
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...image was familiar: Mikhail Gorbachev on another barnstorming journey, surrounded by a sea of citizens. "The point of this trip was to come and see if what we're hearing about your concerns is true," he told workers at the Uralmash plant in Sverdlovsk, in the Soviet Union's industrial heartland. That concern was familiar too: the state of a faltering economy close to collapse and increasingly incapable of delivering goods and services to 287 million citizens...
...what he has seen out his limousine window and in reports brought to him by long-faced ministers than by satellite photographs of American missiles aimed at Moscow. He has been discouraged and radicalized by what he has heard from his own constituents during his walkabouts in Krasnodar, Sverdlovsk and Leningrad -- not by the exhortations, remonstrations or sanctions of foreigners...
...industrial ministries, forced to fulfill their five-year plans, have been slow to relinquish their power. Employees at the giant Uralmash machine works in the town of Sverdlovsk won a victory last year when they successfully protested a state plan on grounds that it called for more heavy machinery than customers needed. But after the workers made their point, Moscow bureaucrats simply sent the orders to a more compliant factory. Said a fed-up manager of another plant at last June's Communist Party Conference: "It's hopeless to fight paperwork. You have to kill off the authors...
Ever since he was brought by Mikhail Gorbachev into the Soviet Politburo in December 1985, no Soviet political figure has been as irreverently outspoken about Soviet life or as ambitious to change it as Boris Yeltsin, 58, a heavyset, 6-ft. 2-in. man from Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. Appointed to clean up the corrupt Moscow party committee, he quickly fired hundreds of bureaucrats and barnstormed the city, criticizing food shortages and general incompetence. But his reforming zeal and a bitter public debate with Politburo conservative Yegor Ligachev led to his public censure and ouster from the Moscow party...
...position in a department responsible for one of the most important yet trouble-prone sectors of the Soviet economy. Yeltsin will help oversee large- scale construction projects, a field in which he specialized when he was a young engineer assisting in the development of the industrial center of Sverdlovsk...