MOSCOW — On July 1, 700 teaching staff at the elite Moscow State University held an unprecedented demonstration demanding prompt payment and indexation of salaries. Similar actions, coordinated by the Moscow Council of
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MOSCOW — Boris Yeltsin's campaign to concentrate near-absolute power in his own hands as president is to reach an important landmark on July 12. The Constitutional Assembly which Yeltsin summoned in order to legitimise his
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MOSCOW — "The enthusiasm voiced in 1990 and 1991 for all types of private property has ... declined, as people have become familiar with the concrete embodiment of abstract principles in practice." Not an outlandish
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MOSCOW — On June 19 a massive 12-day strike wave in the Ukraine, centred on the country's coal miners, began drawing to an uneasy close. But the fight had already spread; on June 21 Russian coal unionists began a picket
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MOSCOW — May was a hot month in Lithuania, as striking teachers headed up the largest wage struggles for many decades in the former Soviet republic. An estimated 4000 teachers began walking off the job on May 13 after
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MOSCOW — With 52 million people, highly developed industries and enormous agricultural riches, the Ukraine might seem destined to become an economic giant. But history, not to speak of international lenders and
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MOSCOW — Threatening to embarrass President Boris Yeltsin with national protest actions on the eve of his Constitutional Assembly, Russian tertiary students on June 3 forced the government to meet a series of unfulfilled
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MOSCOW — Remarkable events have unfolded in the Ukraine since early June. A huge wave of strikes has forced President Leonid Kravchuk to endorse the call for a vote on confidence in his rule. The country's parliament has
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MOSCOW — "It's not realistic to stick to the law", Sergei Yushenkov, an aide to President Boris Yeltsin, was quoted in the Moscow press recently. "The congress is now illegitimate." More bluntly than Yeltsin,
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MOSCOW — Among many of Russia's self-proclaimed democrats, the usual rhetoric of the need to defend "democracy" against "communist revanchism" was suddenly turned off in mid-May. In its place appeared an embarrassed,
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MOSCOW — Police on May 9 were unable to stop more than 50,000 opposition demonstrators from marching through the centre of the Russian capital and onto symbolically important Red Square. Built around the anniversary of
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MOSCOW — To the puzzlement of many observers, Russian President Boris Yeltsin during the first weeks after his April 25 referendum held off introducing the "tough measures" through which he had promised to "neutralise" the