Word: urals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
During a recent trip to the Ural Mountains to drum up support for perestroika, Gorbachev commented to associates that for the first time in his many forays into the heartland, no one had asked him about U.S.-Soviet relations or the threat of global war. The good news, perhaps, was that everyone knows the danger has diminished. The bad news, however, might be that everyone is too obsessed with the scarcity of dairy products, poultry and apartments to notice...