Word: volga
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...ruthless, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people": so one medieval Irish text described the Vikings. "They are the dirtiest of God's creatures," sniffed Arab Historian Ibn Fadlan, who had seen and smelled a Viking encampment on the banks of the Volga in the 10th century, "and they do not wash themselves after sex." Thus, as Hilaire Belloc sardonically put it in our own century...
...mistake, say U.S. experts, was deciding to accelerate production by employing a technique known as water injection, whereby water is forced into wells to make the crude petroleum easier to pump. Result: more oil in the short run, but less in the long term. Some older wells in the Volga-Ural region now pump five barrels of water for every barrel of oil; and the average Soviet well pumps 50% water...
...call to fix the TV set? Pay him with a half-liter of vodka. Need someone to paint a room? Offer him his wages in bottles. Vodka is also the ideal gift for minor officials from whom a small favor is needed. Since vodka flows as freely as the Volga in the U.S.S.R., why do so many Soviet citizens welcome it as either pay or present? For the regular drinker, vodka is expensive at $5.50 a half-liter. And the better brands, which are customarily used as currency and gifts, are often hard to find in stores...
...once valued his Fabergé eggs. The U.S.S.R. has only about 5 million cars, compared with 104 million in the U.S. The list of models available to the average Soviet citizen is small and the price high, ranging from the tiny two-door Zaporozhets ($6,000) to the large Volga sedan...
...allowed to phone his wife. Given two hours, Yelena Sakharov packed up a few clothes and her ailing husband's heart medicine. By nightfall, police had whisked the couple aboard a Tu-134 turbojet on a regularly scheduled flight to Gorky, a military and industrial center on the Volga River, 260 miles east of Moscow. The Sakharovs have been sent to an area that is off limits to foreigners, and the Kremlin hopes they have been effectively cut off from the Western world...