Word: washstand
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...engineers had long known that much of the Soviet economy was a joke, and started saying so. Typical was the protest about the construction of the Novo-Lipetsk steel mill. The plans took up 91 volumes comprising 70,000 pages, specified precisely the location of each nail, lamp or washstand-everything, in fact, except whether the project was economically sound. An engineer estimated perhaps half in jest that at the rate the paper-wafflers were multiplying, by 1980 the planning agencies might well employ every man and woman in the Soviet Union. One mathematician made the astonishing calculation that Russia...