Word: ural
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Although supplies are erratic, cigarettes and bread are practically the only major staples not rationed these days in this industrial center of 1.1 million, situated 700 miles northeast of Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway line through the Ural Mountains. Salt, sugar, butter, eggs, macaroni and even matches must be bought with ration coupons -- assuming, of course, that state- run stores have the items. At harvest time, a shortage of sugar caused a near panic; without it, fruits and berries from family garden plots could not be made into preserves for the coming winter. In Perm, as elsewhere in provincial...
Like all men and women who survive and flourish in public life, Yeltsin has evolved and matured, changing from an ambitious technocrat to an energetic, near bullying party boss to an impassioned if erratic reformer. Born in 1931 in Sverdlovsk province in the Ural Mountains, he grew up in a family so poor that all six members slept on the floor of a one-room apartment with a goat. His childhood was, he has written, "a fairly joyless time." He was always, he later recalled, "a little bit of a hooligan." When he was 11, he lost the thumb...
Born within 30 days of each other in 1931, the two men could scarcely be more different in background and personality. Yeltsin's childhood was a grim struggle for survival in a one-room communal hut in the Ural industrial town of Sverdlovsk. At six, he was looking after his two siblings, boiling potatoes and washing dishes. "It was a fairly joyless time," he recalls, possibly also because his father frequently thrashed him with a leather belt...
Young Boris clashed often with school authorities, but his classmates regularly elected him class leader anyway. An aptitude for construction work and a province-wide reputation as an excellent volleyball player helped secure him admission to the department of civil engineering at Sverdlovsk's Ural | Polytechnic Institute in 1950. In the summer of 1952, Yeltsin hitchhiked and worked his way around the Soviet Union, sleeping where he could and stowing away on trains. "It taught me a lot," he says, "when I spent the night in sheds with poor and homeless people." Yeltsin's empathy for ordinary folk...
...pact, which will make a surprise attack by either camp virtually impossible, limits NATO and the Warsaw Pact to a total of 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armored combat vehicles and 20,000 artillery pieces on each side in the area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. While the totals for each of the alliances are the same, the effect is immensely lopsided. To come down to those ceilings, NATO will have to destroy 2,900 tanks, for example, and no artillery. The Warsaw Pact, however, must scrap nearly 23,000 tanks and 26,900 artillery pieces...