Word: striking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...heart disease. Word reached Moscow's dissident community that Bonner's lips and fingernails had turned blue and that Sakharov could hardly take a few steps without being winded. When the Soviets denied Bonner permission to go abroad for an open-heart operation, her husband went on a hunger strike. The authorities relented, but the ailing Sakharov remained under house arrest until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him back to Moscow. Sakharov's first words as a free man were a demand for the liberation of all remaining Soviet political prisoners...
...valley. Atop his horse, Thomas McGuane is silent for a moment as he surveys the Turkish carpet of prairie juniper, sage, buckbrush and wheatgrass that blankets his 3,700- acre ranch in Big Sky country. "It's funny," he says at last, "but you never know where lightning will strike. You're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall...
Some Freaks, like the author's previous collection of commentary, Writing in Restaurants, is a break from the demands of a difficult craft. It is also a chance for the playwright to mouth off and strike a number of disparate poses: the poker-playing resident of Vermont, the city boy who likes London tea shops, the gunner who belongs to both the N.R.A. and the A.C.L.U. and the provocateur who holds that women have no instinct for compromise and negotiation. Ranging widely, Mamet allows that "I am, by nature and profession, a browser." With the expanded confidence that comes with...
...live television. Sometimes he was all too ready to embrace every needy political cause and seemed in danger of squandering his considerable moral authority. Two weeks before his death, Sakharov joined a handful of Deputies from a radical coalition known as the Interregional Group in calling for a "warning strike" to force Congress to debate Article 6 and a package of reform laws. The strike was a failure, a tactical error that strained relations with Gorbachev, who was already impatient with Sakharov's frequent interruptions at legislative sessions. Nonetheless, Sakharov's death left a permanent void in the ranks...
...Soviet national catastrophe might take either of two forms: a "revolution from below" or a coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...