Word: union
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every so often, a story is so important, so dramatic, that TIME devotes a special issue to the subject. Such is the case this week as we explore how Mikhail Gorbachev has transformed the Soviet Union -- and how much remains to be done. Led by Moscow bureau chief John Kohan, eleven reporters and five photographers spent four months crisscrossing the country in pursuit of their stories. "Wherever we went, glasnost opened doors for us," says Kohan. "There are opportunities for journalists that would have been unthinkable a few years...
Vsevolod Marinov of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences organized the most extensive Soviet poll ever conducted for a U.S. magazine. Since telephone surveys are relatively new in the Soviet Union, respondents were given a number to call to verify that those asking the questions were legitimate pollsters. "We received only about a dozen call-backs," says Marinov. "Some of them assumed we were officials who could help them with their problems. One woman even wanted her leaking radiator fixed...
...Azerbaijan: "The first layer of opponents of perestroika are people who would lose their economic privileges." Not only might they be shifted to less desirable jobs, but the nomenklatura fears that reform may also eliminate the perks -- special stores, food sources, even schools -- that make them the Soviet Union's pampered elite. Those privileges are a touchy matter. When Pravda published a letter from a reader complaining about nomenklatura perks, Ligachev chided the paper for admitting that the privileges even existed...
...more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet...
...democratic, a novel notion came up. Why not unite people who support perestroika into something resembling the popular-front movements that lobbied for social reforms in Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic offers of support. When the broadcast ended at midnight, excited participants remained in the Tallinn studio to draft a manifesto...