Their equipment dates back to the Soviet era, and much of it is no longer usable.
Even during the Soviet era, these shadowy cliques manoeuvred for political power in Tashkent.
Azerbaijan, their neighbour to the west, has had a different passage into the post-Soviet era.
Russia allowed foreign companies into its energy sector to help it with extraction technology in the post-Soviet era.
In Moscow, many of the city's 11.5 million inhabitants own apartments in affordable-housing complexes built during the Soviet era.
They're troops--they're bases, rather, that are kind of left over from that Soviet era when this was a Soviet republic.
Back in the Soviet era, competition with the US pushed Moscow to invest heavily in space flight and new technology.
The paper noted that the Mariynskiy, known in the Soviet era as the Kirov, had always played host to important events.
Russia, which has more than a million soldiers under arms, has been increasing its defense budget from the lows of the immediate post-Soviet era.
Given Russia's new pluralism, it is hard to imagine the Kremlin regaining the iron control it had in the Soviet era, even if it wanted to.
For all their attempts at agreement this week, America and Europe are far from uniting in the face of the more nebulous threats of the post-Soviet era.
Even so, it has seen its cargo volume drop from 225, 000 tonnes per year during the late Soviet era to a barely profitable 60, 000 tonnes per year now.
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His private MI-2 helicopter, a relic of the Soviet era, is perched on a ridge behind him, the pilot ready to whisk him off to the next salmon pool after lunch.
Nonetheless, given the strong attachment of today's Poland to modernity and the western world, I asked one of our hosts why the VIP fleet still used aircraft from the Soviet era.
Another one of Reid's favorite spots in Moscow is the very small Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines, which houses old video games from the Soviet era that you can play.
In fact, one of the major deliverables that will take place at the summit is a outstanding effort to deal with nuclear materials that were carried over from the Soviet era.
Putin is trading in his Mercedes Benz for a Russian-made Zil limousine, which was once a symbol of Soviet era power and used by Soviet leaders Nikita Krushchev, Leonid Breznev and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr. Robinson notes that despite these dangers, Russian support for the project remains high, especially from Viktor Mikhailov, head of the Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) and a holdover from the old Soviet era.
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The festival survived both the terrible three-year Siege of Leningrad during WWII and the restrictions of the Soviet era that ended in 1991, rebounding to include concerts, dances, fireworks, a sailing fleet, jazz performances, street parties and more.
In Russia, there is an ongoing problem with aircraft left over from the Soviet era, though the government has recognised the issue and says it is redoubling its efforts to ensure the safety of passengers going forward.
First, engineers discovered that aerial surveillance radars left over from the Soviet era were better at detecting stealth bombers than they had expected, due to a peculiar match between the dimensions of the planes and the length of the radar waves.
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But anyone who knows the rivalry between these two men from the get-rich-quick privatization scandals of the post-Soviet era knows well that Khodorkovsky would have to beg on his hands and knees to be set free before his sentence is fully served.
As Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union move their economies away from the inefficient autarky of the Soviet era towards a more efficient integration with the world economy, considerations of trade and investment will prevail over other forces.
It will replace the Soviet-era Ignalina plant, which is due to be shut down in 2009.
Lithuania had to shut its Soviet-era plant there as a condition of joining the European Union.
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Iran is defended, but mainly by Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles of a kind the Israelis have dealt with before.
By December 1992 Mr Gaidar had lost his job at the hands of the Duma, Russia's Soviet-era parliament.
Erarta occupies a Soviet-era building on a still-gentrifying stretch of prime post-industrial real estate on the tony Vasilyevsky Island.
The deal assures supplies of crude oil for Mazeikiu through the Soviet-era pipelines which tie it still to Russia.
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