Word: candor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet government's astonishingly blunt report on Chernobyl is but one of a number of examples of Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness. In recent months Soviet officials and journalists have been discussing the difficulties and shortcomings of their society with unprecedented candor, and newspaper and magazine editors have been publishing more and more critical letters from readers...
...candor goes well beyond the public media. Earlier this year Boris Yeltsin, the Gorbachev-appointed party boss for Moscow, surprised a meeting of propagandists with a blistering denunciation of the past administration of the city. Yeltsin described Moscow's well-known but seldom mentioned urban woes in painful detail. A million Muscovites still live in communal apartments where they share cooking and toilet facilities with other families, Yeltsin pointed out, while in the past decade the city has slipped from second place in the Soviet Union to 58th in new-housing construction. Drunkenness, he continued, has not diminished...
...that he is the man who just a month ago called Ronald Reagan "a new Hitler." Instead, the seasoned comandante played the polished politician, while he embarked on a campaign to win American hearts and minds. During meetings with political, church and press groups, he answered questions with some candor, trying, though not always successfully, to steer clear of revolutionary jargon. Appearing before the United Nations Security Council, he appealed for U.N. endorsement of a recent World Court decision that called for Washington to stop supporting the contra rebels. "We do not want confrontation," he declared. "Nicaragua is willing...
Moscow, of course, has many Chernobyl troubles in addition to the damage caused by the blast and radiation. It suffers from a serious credibility gap as a result of its lack of candor about the accident. Other nations have severely criticized the Soviets for first concealing the disaster from the world and then providing scant information. Many Soviet citizens are also resentful because they were not warned of the danger until more than a week after the accident. Residents of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 80 miles from the crippled reactor, took no safety precautions in the same period. Many...
...Soviets' lack of candor struck many observers as part of an ingrained national trait. Says Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "There is a traditional fear and concern within the Soviet Union about panic. After all, mass panic is what set off the revolutions in 1905 and 1917. The authorities have an inordinate fear of the masses running wild...