Word: vodka
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...Vodka & Freedom. But workers, no longer menaced by secret police, dreamed of a freedom of their own-the right to stay away from work. In the first half of 1957, absenteeism has more than doubled, to 26 million man-hours lost. To drown their woes, they took to drink at an increasing rate (7.5 liters hard liquor per head per year-30% above 1956). Gomulka warned the workers that he could not raise wages until they produced more; the workers replied that they would not work harder without some real evidence of a better life. They began agitating for wage...
...wielded clubs. A worried Gomulka dispatched a trade union chief, a vice-minister and a security general from Warsaw, called out the troops to keep order, pressed 750 trucks into action to provide transportation in Poland's second largest city (pop. 675,000), and banned the sale of vodka to prevent "real trouble...
...Karaganda administration of Gulag, the vast slave-labor system that Malenkov helped found. In Ust Kamenogorsk, Malenkov will be constantly watched. If his exile follows the pattern of previous top-party banishments (Trotsky was banished to the same province), he will be amply supplied with creature comforts and vodka, but there will be no escape. Nor would there be any real contact with people, because the risk of close association with him would be too great...
...dirty work, and did not have to clear everything with Khrushchev. As Khrushchev strode confidently through Communist Czechoslovakia, he was followed by tanned, blond, smiling State Security Boss Ivan Serov, watchdog of the Communist state and liquidator of millions. Many of Nikita's more reckless, vodka-primed speeches to the Czechs were drastically edited by other hands before being passed out to the press: Did Stalin let someone else, without his say-so, edit his remarks? The easy confidence of the happy tourists reflected their satisfaction at the turn of events, but it also raised a question...
...accomplished performer on the Ukrainian flute, the town's best dancer of the gopak (hearing of this, Stalin once ordered him to dance the gopak; he did), and a prodigious drinker of yorsh (a potent mass boilermaker made of six pints of beer to iV pints of vodka). Born in a reed-and-mud hut, the son of a miner, he had taught himself to read, worked as a pipe fitter. In bell-bottomed pants and a grey wool cap, Sunday costume of the Donets worker of his day, he was often seen around the taverns, downing yorsh...