In city, town and village across the vast plains, students last week burned the midnight oil as they crammed for university entrance exams. Providing moral support, their parents besieged admissions officers with pleading telegrams, desperately sought out the help of influential friends in politics or government. Doctors suddenly found themselves busy trying to stamp out an epidemic of youthful exhaustion and nervous tension.
Far worse than the admissions crush at the Ivies or Oxbridge, so it seems, is the placement struggle currently taking place in that self-styled educational paradise, the Soviet Union. Although Russia claims to spare no rubles when it comes...