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- нарушить правило;

- другая крайность;

- смягчающие обстоятельства;

- до недавнего времени;

- «нулевой вариант»;

- быть свободным от чего-либо;

- уменьшиться в два раза;

- получить национальную премию;

- отстаивать свою позицию.

II. Answer the questions:

1. What is a consensus in schools?

2. What should schools stop doing?

3. What was the position of independent schools?

4. What does the recent report say?

5. What do the authors of the report suggest?

6. What are the categories of drug education lessons?

7. What is the most effective way to respond to young people on this problem?

III. Say what is true and what is false. Correct the false sentences:

1. Schools have an excess of policies, both on drugs education and what to do about those who are caught breaking the rules.

2. Schools have to stop pretending that they can get away with ignoring the pupils who take drugs beyond their gates.

3. Parents don’t want to know about the problem and are not prepared to meet it.

4. The idea is to emphasise to children that they are unique, to encourage them to respect others and to respect themselves.

5. We will never stop them trying things, but what we can do is delay the outset of use, point out the consequences of it.

6. If an adult - teacher or parent - tells teenagers something about drugs, they are eager to listen.

7. The Government does understand that drugs are being offered to all of us, and it can be very hard to say no.

8. You have to give the pupils as many skills as you can and arm them with the facts, so that in end, they can make responsible decision.

IY. Find a word or phrase in the text which is similar in the meaning to the following:

- a general agreement among a group of people about a subject or about how something should be done;

- a young person who is no longer a child but who has not yet become an adult;

- to be officially told that you no longer belong to a school or organization;

- the prevention of war by having weapons to use as a threat to people who might be enemies;

- the effect that something has on a situation, process or person;

- easy to attack and to damage or destroy;

- a result or effect of a situation.

Y. Express the meaning of the following words and phrases:

- to be counter productive;

- mitigating circumstances;

- head-in-sand approach;

- random testing;

- fresh-faced boys;

- all-embracing approach;

- to stand the ground

YI. Demonstrate the meaning of the following words and expressions in sentences of your own:

- plethora;

- to be prone;

- breakthrough;

- to be immune

- to preach;

- outset;

- persuasive;

- to challenge;

- to stand the ground.

YII. Topics for discussion:

1. The young and the drugs.

2. How to stop proliferation of drugs.

UNIT 17

THE GREAT LEAP BACKWARD

(part 1)

About 100 km from Moscow an invisible boundary separates the two states that, many Russians will tell you, coexist uncomfortably within the Russian Federation. One is Moscow itself, all-powerful and incredibly rich, even after the latest economic meltdown. Beyond it is the Other Russia, where salaries are paid in anything from fertilizer to rat poison, if they are paid at all, and where most peasants have already reverted to a cashless economy. On one side of the dividing line, in the capital, the state can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild an unlovely 19th century cathedral; on the other, they cannot even scrape together the $5,000 needed to restore the Blagoveshchensk Cathedral in Solvychegodsk, one of Russia's most historic monuments. In Moscow, businessmen still pass through metal detectors at their favorite restaurants and drop $120 a head on lunch. That amount in the Other Russia isa month's pay for a teacher.

A 1,600-km trip by car and boat through the Russian north revealed the Other Russia in all its beauty and despair: a land so remote that it was used for centuries as a place of exile, but whose powerful rivers were the main thoroughfares linking Muscovy to the outside world; industrial towns that took off during the Stalinist purge years, but have now crashed, villages that have been abandoned by the state that founded them. Everywhere, people are bitter and angry at Moscow. They feel disenfranchised, dependent on events in the capital for any change in their condition. Occasionally someone refers, half- wistfully, to Stenka Razin or Yemelyan Pugachev, the rebels who shook the Russian state in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most admit, though, that peasant revolts in Russia have always faltered then failed, smothered by the sheer size of the country. Nothing will happen here, predicts a retired police officer, Oleg Kukushkin, after a long description of growing unhappiness in the region of Vologda, 500 km north of Moscow. People are «too cowed and too far from Moscow. In 1917 it took them two weeks to find out there had been f revolution in Russia».

The regional capital, also called Vologda, six hours by car from Moscow, is firmly part of the Other Russia. The city is devoid of elegant Moscow-style shops or fancy restaurants. Its two attempts at eating are Saigon Cafe and the Hanoi Cafe, establishments whose Vietnamese roots are recognizable only from, the massive jars of snakes marinated in alcohol. In the 16th century the city was favored by Ivan the Terrible, who used it as a refuge from the menace of Moscow. Later it became a center for political exiles, and in 1918, as German forces advanced on Petrograd, it enjoyed a few months of eminence as the country's diplomatic capital. Vologda's first post-Soviet governor, Nikolai Podgornov, spent much of this year on trial for corruption – he was allegedly unable to keep his hand out of the till, a habit he is said to have acquired during the Soviet era as the chairman of a collective farm.

His successor, who came in on a reform ticket, is no improvement, says Petr Mukhin, deputy editor of the main local newspaper Russky Sever (the Russian North). In June the paper wrote an expose on the current governor. Its author, the paper's editor-in-chief, promptly hired himself a bodyguard.

Beyond Vologda the roads are bad, and drivers prefer not to travel at night for fear of banditry. A couple of hours north along rutted roads is Totma. Nobody could understand why I wanted to go there. My driver, a onetime policeman, opined that we were probably being followed. The security services would assume that anyone voluntarily traveling up here had to have a subversive motive, he explained. "You're looking for the back of beyond " a woman in the local administration said to me incredulously when she asked the purpose of my traveling there. "This is the back of beyond."

Totma, however, was once a powerhouse of merchant Russia. Adventurers from the town opened up trade routes to Siberia, Alaska, China and the west coast of the United States. One Totma native, Ivan Kuskov, founded Fort Ross in California in 1812, and after years in North America, retired to his birthplace along with a wife, who by some accounts was a Native American. At that time Totma was a flourishing merchant center, dealing in furs, wax, silks and salt – the town's coat of arms has a black fox on it, an animal native to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, not to northern Russia. Totma's main rivals were other northern towns – Veliky Ustyug, for example, where two hundred years ago merchants who had made their money in Siberia and America built luxurious riverside residences, or Solvychegodsk, where the greatest of the merchant barons, the Stroganovs, built their first fortune from salt. In richer countries these towns would now be living museums. Instead they, like Totma, are rotting.

Hundred of thousands of tourists used to visit Veliky Ustyug every year in the Soviet period. Now the number of visitors has dwindled to a trickle: there is no way to get there any more. More recently, local industry has gone the same way as tourism. Factories have closed or have run out of money. Some pay their workers with "checks" – small pieces of paper that look like cheap business cards – that are accepted in shops instead of currency. The only island of prosperity is the mayor's office, where foreign cars are parked, the staff wend their way self-importantly through clumps of petitioners in dark corridors, and where the mayor himself was too busy to comment. In Solvychegodsk, the museum has closed down part of the magnificent Blagoveshchensk Cathedral because the roof is leaking. The director, Aleksei Belchuk – unable to raise the $5,000 he needs for repairs – has, like the rest of the staff, gone through most of the year without receiving any pay.

If Totma recalls Muscovy's past greatness, ugly industrial towns like Kotlas were built by the Soviet Union as symbols of the future. Now, ironically, the symbols are converging, dual facets of social decay. A few dozen kilometers from Solvychegodsk, Kotlas has ground to a halt. Founded in 1917, the town went through a boom during the purge years of the late 1930s when millions of people went through the Gulag system.

The city was a redistribution center for political prisoners, who were brought in by train and then moved out to build railway lines into the Arctic at a terrible cost in human lives. Prison barracks lined Kotlas' streets and railway tracks, old-timers recall. In the 1950s the camps were closed and factories built on their sites – occasionally the builders turned up human bones during excavations. A defense plant produced parts for missile systems, a meat combine shipped sausages to Moscow, a busy airport was the regional hub. Now everything is closed, and the pilots, once part of the regional elite, eke out a living as cab drivers. Here, like everywhere, the voices are angry but confused. Sergei Stepanov, an unemployed former professional soldier in his late twenties, talks of the need for a "strong hand" to rule the country. "The Russian is used to the lash," he says. If there was a revolt against Moscow, Sergei declares with more bluster than logic, "I would be the first one out on the street. If someone organized it."

(to be continued)

I. Find English equivalents for the following:

- экономический кризис;

- наскрести 5 тысяч долларов;

- годы сталинских репрессий;

- лишенный гражданских прав;

- действовать нерешительно;

- высокое положение;

- по некоторым данным;

- нажить состояние на соли;

- перебиваться кое-как;

- заместитель редактора;

- герб.

II. Answer the questions:

1. In what parts has been Russia divided?

2. What are the main features of each part?

3. How do people feel in the Other Russia?

4. What does Vologda look like?

5. What is the city history?

6. What was Totma famous for?

7. What is the situation in Veliky Ustyug?

III. Say what is true and what is false. Correct the false sentences:

1.Moscow is all-powerful and incredibly rich, even after the latest economic meltdown.

2. Everywhere people are bitter and angry at Moscow.

3. people feel disenfranchised, dependent on events in capital any change in their life.

4. Vologda has a lot of elegant Moscow-style shops and fancy restaurants.

5. Totma was once a powerhouse of merchant Russia.

6. Some Factories pay their workers with «checks» - that are accepted in shops instead currency.

7. The Russian is used to the lash.

IY. Find a word or phrase in the text which, in context, is similar in meaning to the following:

- to change people’s way of life to the way life they had before,

- a violent action taken by f large group of people against the rulers of their country,

- to say what you believe that it will happen,

- something which is likely to cause serious harm to a person or thing, a place you can go for safety and protection;

- a slow flow in very small amount,

- to make someone behave in a particular way because they have been frightened or oppress.

Y. Express the meaning of the following words and phrases:

- meltdown;

- to revert;

- to scrape together;

- exile;

- thoroughfare;

- disenfranchised;

- eminence;

- to eke out a living;

- powerhouse.

YI. Demonstrate the meaning of the following words and expressions in the sentences of your own:

- leap;

- to revert to;

- thoroughfare;

- to falter;

- menace;

- successor;

- clump;

- to raise the money;

- hub;

- bluster.

YII. Topics for discussion:

1. Moscow and the Other Russia.

2. How do you understand «the back of beyond».

UNIT 18

THE GREAT LEAP BACKWARD

(part 2)

It is the villages, however, that have suffered the most from the subsequent economic turmoil. When the system plumed people out in the middle of nowhere, it made it worth their while to stay there. Life in the north was tough but predictable from cradle to grave. People received extra pay for working there, early retirement and subsidized food. The daily routine in Sogra, population 1,000 and 160 km from the nearest paved road, was typical. Life centered around a logging combine and one of the least productive collective farms in the area, which nonetheless did well thanks to the subsidies handed out to underachieving farms. Once a year at high summer, barges came up river and unloaded 12 months’ supplies of foodstuffs and consumer goods, including enough vodka to keep adult males permanently pickled. When people wanted to travel to a local regional center, or even a big city like Arkhangelsk, they flew. Ten flights a day left from the village landing strip, more if needed. "They ran like taxis," one villager recalled.

This all ended in the 1990s. The airstrip closed about three years ago and the barges stopped soon after that. Now most villagers keep a cow, poach fish from the river and grow potatoes and onions for the winter. The logging combine has folded and the farm has disintegrated. And the local people go nowhere – the inhabitants of a hamlet 18 km downstream from Sogra say they have not been there for three years because they do not have fuel for their boats. The elderly, paradoxically enough, now form the mainstay of the rural cash economy. Pensions still arrive more or less regularly, though delays of two months are no uncommon. Fortunately for Sogra and other northern villages, many people are retired. Not surprisingly, locals are nostalgic. "In the past, they lived like slaves", says Nikolai Lychev, head of Sogra's school, which is housed in a former Gulag hospital building. "Now they look back on their slavery with delight".

One thing that has not changed in the past 10 catastrophic years is the way people – rich or poor, educated or simple- view the Russian state. The government exists to help itself and its close friend, people say, not to improve society. "People go into the government to steal", says Mukhin, the young deputy editor of Russky Sever in Vologda. In Vodyuga, hamlet of 15 households 30 km from Sogra, a retired farmworker, Valentin Nekhoroshkov, recalls how the local collective farm was broken up: "The usual way, whoever was closest to the bosses got the best land". In another small river settlement, an old farmhand named Viktor sums up the situation in a single, poetic sentence. "Happy is he who lives next door to the boss." Viktor's wife, Zhenya, a retired milkmaid, has seen her savings destroyed by successive waves of so-called government economic reforms.

She has put aside what is left for a special occasion. "When Yeltsin dies I'll throw a party to celebrate and get the whole village drunk,» she announces.

Most Muscovites try not to think about the Other Russia. It is too depressing. But soon they may have to. It used to seem that Moscow was the golden future and the Other Russia was the past that some day people would remember with a shudder. Now, with Russia mired in an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions, many people are wondering if they had it wrong. Perhaps the Other Russia is this country's future after all, at least for the next few years.

(Paul Quinn-Judge, Time)

I. Find English equivalents for the following:

- отправлять груз;

- повседневная жизнь;

- отстающие колхозы;

- в разгар лета;

- устраивать вечеринку;

- увязнуть в экономическом кризисе.

II. Answer the questions:

1. Who has suffered the most from the Soviet collapse?

2. Why was life in the north predictable from the cradle to the grave?

3. What happened during the 1990s?

4. Who is the mainstay of the rural cash economy? Why?

5. What has not changed in the past 10 years?

6. What is the attitude of the most Muscovites to the Other Russia?

III. Say what is true and what is false. Correct the false sentences:

1. It is the small towns, that have suffered the most from the Soviet collapse and the subsequent economic turmoil.

2. Life in the north was tough but predictable from cradle to grave.

3. Once a year at high summer barges came up river and unloaded 12 month’s supplies of foodstuffs and consumer goods.

4. Now most of the villages keep a cow, poach fish from river grow vegetables for the winter.

5. The youth now form the mainstay of the rural cash economy.

6. Several things have not changed in the past 10 catastrophic years.

7. Most Muscovites try not to think about the Other Russia.

IY. Find a word or phrase in the text which is similar in meaning to the following:

- a small bed for a baby which you can rock from side to side;

- to be in a difficult and awkward situation;

- a filling of very great pleasure;

- a very small village;

- having features that are typical for areas that are far away from large towns or cities;

- to be difficult or full of hardships;

- the thin strip of leather at the and of the whip.

Y. Express the meaning of the following words and phrases:

- turmoil;

- subsidized food;

- the daily routine;

- to do well;

- subsidies;

- underachieving farms;

- consumer goods;

- mainstay;

- successive.

YI. Demonstrate the meaning of the following words and expressions in the sentences of your own:

- turmoil;

- the daily routine;

- to poach;

- mainstay;

- delight;

- to throw a party.

YII. Topics for discussion:

1. Do you agree it was the villages that have suffered the most from the Soviet collapse and the subsequent economic turmoil? Why?

2. Russia’s future.

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