MOSCOW — Some day an accounting will be made of the economic damage which Yeltsin's reforms have dealt our country. Even now, people have begun to speak about the moral losses. The group that has suffered most is
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MOSCOW — When independent commercial firms reappeared on the Russian scene a few years back, they naturally enough brought advertising with them. Citizens weren't totally unused to this phenomenon; for years, state
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MOSCOW — When perestroika began, the environmental movement in the USSR grew strongly. But the movement has tended to die away as anger at the damage wrought by the old order was swamped by the difficulties of surviving
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MOSCOW — Ask any Muscovite what there are most of in the city, and he or she will probably answer, "Commercial street kiosks". These are ugly structures, often with steel bars on the windows, which trade in a
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MOSCOW — Russians travellers are mostly still obliged to cover the huge distances in our country by rail. While no-one would expect the Russian railways to be an oasis of order and efficiency within the current general
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MOSCOW — "You can't buy good health in a pharmacy!" That was a frequent refrain in Soviet newspapers during the era of Brezhnevite "stagnation". Writers used to stress that instead of treating yourself with medicines,
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MOSCOW — How did women live in the USSR when perestroika was in the future, and when the word "market" referred only to a large covered space where foodstuffs cost more than in the shops? Considerably worse than men, if the
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MOSCOW — "We haven't had a single case of a woman being murdered", the head of a Moscow callgirl agency boasted recently to a reporter for the journal Business World. For Russian gangsters dissatisfied with the returns
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MOSCOW — Russia is now suffering from its worst demographic crisis of the postwar period. For the first time since 1945, deaths in November and December 1991 outnumbered births. For every 1000 residents of Moscow in
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MOSCOW — With price liberalisation and the advance of private ownership, Russians are periodically assured, their country is on course for the market. What is this market, and where is it to be found? People here who
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MOSCOW — How big a bribe do you have to pay if you want some service performed by an employee of the Moscow mayor's office? Ten per cent of the total value of the business involved. This figure
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MOSCOW — Repeatedly in the past few months, the Russian media have carried reports detailing the sombre news: women in this country are no longer willing to bear children. The reports have noted social causes —