Word: volgograd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...VOLGOGRAD, Russia: Struggling to compensate workers in the cash-strapped post-Soviet era, Russian bureaucrats in Volgograd have turned to an even older form of payment to offer their workers: Turnips. And carrots, beets, and other assorted vegetables from the local harvest. The workers, who are owed about $175,000, refused the offer and staged a one hour protest strike. They say they will strike for real next week if they are not paid in cash. But in a country where even soldiers are reduced to begging on street corners to make enough cash for lunch, workers might ultimately have...
...market liberals disdain his vacillating support for economic reform; Communists and nationalists detest him for his role in ending the empire. No matter. Gorbachev is waging a quixotic race for Russia's presidency and this day is heading 700 miles south of the Kremlin to plead his case in Volgograd...
...over. But when the bubbles clear, it is not The Star Spangled Banner playing over the Bernat Picornell Pool but the strains of another anthem. And the man who lays claim to being the new Johnny Weissmuller, the new Mark Spitz, the new Matt Biondi, is a fellow from Volgograd named Popov, winner of the 50-m free and the fastest swimmer of the XXVth Olympiad...
Sometimes the communist rulers revised their pantheon of heroes and cities as politics changed: Stalingrad, originally Czaritsin, became Volgograd after Joseph Stalin's crimes were made public in the 1960s. (Another Soviet joke: After the change from Stalingrad was announced, the Kremlin supposedly received a cable that read, I CONCUR WITH THE CRITICISM OF THE COMRADES. SIGNED: JOSEPH VOLGIN...