Word: tass
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After hesitating for four days, the Kremlin was finally compelled, in the words of the official news agency TASS, "to take the measure of last resort" and declare a state of emergency. Early Saturday morning, Soviet troops stormed the center of Baku in tanks and armored cars, smashing through makeshift barricades of buses and trucks. The troops exchanged fire with extremists, armed with submachine guns and sniper rifles. Eyewitnesses described streets awash with "pools of blood" and corpses strewn on the road to the highway; there were even unconfirmed reports that Soviet tanks had opened fire on the demonstrators...
...streets. As word of the killing spread, marchers turned out in towns throughout the country. Because of the government's total control of travel and communications, rumors often replaced information. East European news agencies such as Yugoslavia's Tanjug and, in the new world of glasnost, even Moscow's TASS and East Germany's ADN, became important sources of news. They reported that Rumanian army troops had joined in some of the protests, that more soldiers had been executed by the Securitate for refusing to fire into crowds, and that striking workers were threatening to blow up their factories...
Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...
...decision that had very serious consequences for our country was made behind the back of the party and the people," Shevardnadze said in the speech, the full text of which was carried by the official Tass news agency...
...state-run media would contribute to this hysteria," said Dr. Yakov Rudakov, a leading psychotherapist with the Institute for Physical-Technical Problems. Even the obsession with UFOs may be a projection of Soviet anxieties, a pseudoscientific distraction from the increasing economic and political burdens of daily life. Enraged that TASS publishes such reports, one Muscovite said, "It's a reflection of a country falling apart...