Word: western
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HAVE YOU GOT A WORD MEANING LEVERAGED BUYOUT? Drawing up a contract that is precisely equivalent in two languages, English and Russian, can be a mind- bending exercise. One problem: there are no words in the Russian language for many Western business terms. Michael Bonsignore, president of Honeywell International, took special care in preparing contracts for the equipment that his company is providing for four Soviet fertilizer plants. Says he: "We translated our English documents into Russian, then had someone else translate them back into English to make sure that we were really saying to them exactly what we wanted...
...HAVING A BIG MAC ATTACK! The expense of maintaining Western employees in the U.S.S.R. is extraordinarily high, as much as $400,000 a year % for a one-worker office. Says a Western diplomat: "The cost of renovating a Soviet apartment to our standards is $100,000, if you can find one. And to keep the Western employees sane, you have to fly them out of the country at least four times a year." Because employees feel deprived of their comforts, some companies provide allowances, so that personnel can import such hard-to- find items as toothpaste, fruit, toilet paper...
...last as long as six months, and patients are often treated with sulfazine, a drug that induces high fever. The intended result: to sweat the toxins out of the body and thus shock it into a change of behavior. The drug's effects are not long lasting, and Western doctors refuse...
...Pepsi has not exactly replaced vodka as the national beverage, it is widely available. Cooperative restaurants enjoy a fairly brisk business, at least among those who can afford the prices (lunches and dinners often go for $20 to $30 a person, without drinks or wine). Major hotels offer Western joint- venture seekers many distinctly unsocialist hard-currency attractions -- slot machines, for one -- while out on the sidewalks, better-dressed young people hurry by, oblivious to the stiff-knuckled old women sweeping the streets with birch-branch brooms...
Elektrosila is an exception among Soviet factories, which lag at least a generation behind their Western counterparts in efficiency and quality. The typical Soviet plant's labor productivity is a paltry one-third the average level of factories in non-Communist industrial countries. At the same time, Soviet plants use two to three times as much energy and raw materials as ( Western factories consume for the same amount of output. Since most Soviet plants answer only to bureaucrats instead of consumers, finished merchandise is often shoddy or simply the wrong type of product to meet demand...