Word: unionizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shinkaretsky's voice is a lonely one, since the consumer movement is just awakening in the Soviet Union. Besides a small group of activists in the capital, there are fledgling consumer groups in Leningrad and Kiev. A draft law was introduced in Moscow in February that would allow customers to exchange shoddy goods, but Shinkaretsky is not impressed. He wants to start a consumer journal and set up a council that tests cars, stereos and, particularly, television sets, a fire hazard because they have a tendency to explode...
...button on sale at Moscow's Izmailovo open-air market not long ago neatly captured the country's traditional attitude toward sex: IN THE SOVIET UNION, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SEX. As far as public discussion is concerned, the statement is not far from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology...
Magazines such as Soviet Photo and Ogonyok are publishing erotic pictures, and there is a publication called Moscow Personals. Kon's own textbook, An Introduction to Sexology, became available in the Soviet Union last year, more than a decade after it was first published in Eastern Europe. Already half a million copies of the Soviet edition are in print. An explicit sex manual, Advice to Young Couples, is a best seller at bookstalls...
...ninth- and tenth-graders are choosing their own elective courses. Rote learning, long the mainstay of education for the 42 million students in the nation's 130,000 schools, is beginning to yield to free debate. Like America's system of local school boards, councils made up of trade-union and party members, parents and students have been created to give people more control over their children's classrooms. Boring textbooks that only timidly touched upon the terrors of Stalin have been withdrawn. Until new textbooks become available, articles from newspapers, enlivened by the candor of glasnost, serve...
Careful, there. This is no ordinary statue you're adjusting, but one representing the father of the state, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man who renamed himself Lenin and reshaped Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution. One crucial slip by workers at Moscow's All-Union Artistic-Production Association (hear the clang of bureaucracy in that name), and they must pour a whole new mold. In attempting nothing less than a second revolution, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is also adjusting Lenin, paying lip service to his dogma even while reshaping it to fit the needs of the U.S.S.R. The task is a delicate...