Word: ago
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...land hardly famous for political comebacks, Boris Yeltsin, the brash populist who a year ago was ousted as Moscow Communist Party boss and candidate member of the Politburo, has become a symbol of the opportunities and obstacles that Gorbachev now faces. Yeltsin's triumph, along with the defeat of party hacks from Siberia to Lithuania, represented a rousing endorsement of Gorbachev's vision of perestroika. But it also represented a feisty revolt against the failure of his reforms to improve the harsh realities of Soviet life...
Gorbachev had already secured one of the seats in the new legislature reserved for top party officials. Thus he did not have to confront personally the deflating question that dogs American candidates: Are you better off now than you were four years ago...
Five of the six men who have led the Soviet Union have clung to power until their deaths. But the one exception -- Nikita Khrushchev, the earthy reformer of a generation ago -- stands as a cautionary reminder of the perils of perestroika. The combination of glasnost and demokratizatsiya runs the risk of giving conservatives the chance to point to a breakdown in social order. This is a major consideration in one of the most order-obsessed regimes on earth. Gorbachev's situation, like the fate of his reforms, will thus remain precarious...
...thing that can be said with certainty about perestroika is that it has exposed how difficult rebuilding the Soviet economy will be. The obstacles are greater, the situation more dire and the fixes more fundamental than even Gorbachev suspected four years ago. "Frankly speaking, comrades, we have underestimated the extent and gravity of the deformations," he told a Party Conference last year. Nikolai Shmelev, one of the country's radical economic gadflies, has put it more vividly: "We are now like a seriously ill man who, after a long time in bed, takes his first step with the greatest degree...
...extension of the openness and public airing * spawned by Gorbachev's glasnost crusade. Of the reform trinity, glasnost has wrought the most tangible changes, especially for the Soviet intellectual community, Gorbachev's most solid base of support. Nowadays the only heresy is orthodoxy. Says economist Shmelev: "Four years ago, people felt themselves living behind barbed wire. Now we have a degree of freedom for intellectuals and for ordinary people that would have been unimaginable before...