Word: tbilisi
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...five men and three or four women who boarded Aeroflot Flight 6833 to Leningrad were members of a wedding party, though elopement seemed more on their minds. Not long after the plane left the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, about 85 miles from the Turkish border, the group ordered the pilot to fly to Turkey. Instead, the captain alerted ground control and flew in circles around the airport at Tbilisi before finally touching down there. Throughout the afternoon and night, the plane sat on the tarmac while the hijackers demanded that it be refueled. Meanwhile, a crack antiterrorist squad was brought...
...days later, in a speech apparently intended to balance Brezhnev's, Politburo Member Chernenko told a crowd in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia, that Moscow remained committed to better relations with the U.S.-even if that means waiting for the next Administration. "If Washington proves unable to rise above primitive antiCommunism, well, then we are sufficiently strong and we can wait," he said. Chernenko added a complaint often heard from Soviet officials: "For almost two years the rulers of the U.S. have been 'flexing their muscles.' For almost two years myths about a 'Soviet threat...
Just getting aloft presents its challenges. Planes regularly land and take off not just hours but even days late. One foreign traveler waited in a Moscow airport for 17 hours before his flight to Tbilisi was announced. His airport bus proceeded to roll along the tarmac and stop at three different planes; at each one the ground hostess would yell out: "Is this the plane to Tbilisi?" The bus finally came to the fourth-and right-plane. There was only one problem: no pilot. The traveler finally abandoned the effort at 3 a.m., luggage unclaimed and Tbilisi unvisited...
...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...