Word: volga
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...real steps toward privatization, the Soviet government announced last week that it is offering to sell at least 30% of its largest industrial company, Volga Automobile Associated Works, maker of Lada sedans, to a foreign investor. The portion of the company up for sale is worth more than $1 billion. The most likely purchaser is the Italian automaker Fiat S.p.A. But the Soviets are not about to miss out on any better offers: they have hired Bear, Stearns, the Wall Street investment banking house, to provide them with some American know-how. Bear, Stearns is bullish on the U.S.S.R. Says...
...satire, mostSoviets would deny that there's anything funny atall about communism. After all, the putatively"classless society" in practice means equality ofpoverty. It also means an obscene level of wealthfor the political elite, who enjoy summerdachas on the Crimea and special lanes onthe highways for their sleek Volga limosines whilethe rest of the population is holed away in huge,ghastly impersonal building complexes, one or tworooms to a family...
...resentments caused by the army's brutal suppression of a peaceful demonstration in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi last April, the central government does not dare ask the agitated Georgians to return Turkish villages to the Meskhetians. Moscow has ordered up a plan for repatriating the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, but nothing has been done...
This new awareness has inspired campaigns to stop the ecological destruction of the Volga River and to rescue village churches, converted into everything from sports clubs to vodka-bottling plants during anti-religious campaigns of the past. The rich harmonies of Russian Orthodox liturgical music now sound in concert halls, and the long-banned works of religious philosophers like Vladimir Solovyov and Nicholas Berdyayev have been rediscovered. But amid this cultural renaissance, there are disquieting signs that bitterness over Russia's present woes is spawning intolerance of other ethnic groups...
...Soviet Empire, like many such conglomerations, slowly evolved out of centuries of aggression, anarchy and pure accident. About 500 years ago, the Muscovy state that was beginning to emerge from Mongol rule extended over just a few hundred miles on the upper reaches of the Volga. Today the U.S.S.R. represents one-sixth of the world's landmass, and its 289 million people include Armenians, Buddhists, Muslims, Tatars, Uzbeks, Yakuts -- more than a hundred different national and religious groups united mainly by their mistrust of their rulers and one another...