Word: tbilisi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...clannish, passionate and shrewd. They are also notoriously unconcerned with the principles of socialism where making money is concerned. The Georgian penchant for private enterprise has long troubled Moscow, and lately its concern has been increasing. Over the past few months, a series of fires and bombings have racked Tbilisi, the capital, and, usually in typical veiled fashion, Communist officials admit that the region's entrepreneurs are fighting fiat with fire in resisting a 3½-year crackdown on their ruble-rousing ways...
...aircraft factory last fall injured two guards. A fire gutted the city's major children's store on the eve of the 25th Communist Party Congress last February, and other arson attacks have damaged the opera house, two film studios, a sports complex and the laboratory of Tbilisi's Agricultural Institute. The incidents, complained the Georgian party's Central Committee, were the work of "carriers of the evils of the past, striving to express their dissatisfaction in a most infamous fashion...
...young mother of two: "They said you didn't buy eggs in Israel. They simply lay about in the streets." Others are convinced that they had been lured to Israel as cannon fodder for its wars. "It's the fault of the American Jewish millionaires," says Tbilisi Shopkeeper Joseph Mamishva-lov. "They pay their money but want us to bear the brunt. A boil is good on somebody else's body...
...startles Russians. An official report from Estonia excoriates the republic's Economy Minister for "complete passiveness and impotence"; he did not make chemical and pulp plants install antipollution devices required by law. Izvestia is complaining about a metallurgical plant that has illegally "poisoned" the air of Rustavi, near Tbilisi. In Russia's far north, Pravda says, an oil-drilling crew did not take "the most basic precautions" to avoid polluting the Pechora River...
...most abstract works, like his Violin Concerto (set to Stravinsky) and Jerome Robbins' Goldberg Variations (Bach), dances that eschew decor, spectacle and story line in favor of balanced and unbalanced compositions that are mod, sexy and athletic. The results were varied. The Georgians in their sunny Italianate capital, Tbilisi, responded more enthusiastically to those works than ballet-goers in Kiev and Leningrad. But more traditional Balanchine ballets like Symphony in C (Bizet) caught on at every stop. Balanchine's Who Cares? (Gershwin) was a steady crowd pleaser, though in Tbilisi and Moscow a stomach bug swept the company...