Word: centralization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage Five-Year Plan to improve the economy that Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov unveiled last week reflected the tug-of-war going on within the leadership. Ryzhkov made clear that his approach represented a "third alternative" to making minor corrections in central planning or plunging headlong into a free-market economy. Over the next two years, he said, the state intended to use "rigid directive measures" to reduce the national deficit from about 10% to 2.5% of GNP and increase supplies of consumer goods. A real market with varied forms of property ownership would take shape after 1992, he added, when...
Liberals labeled the Ryzhkov proposals a "defeat for perestroika and a victory for central planning." Radical economist Gavril Popov dismissed the new Five-Year Plan as a return to "administrative socialism." Noting that the plan even sets goals for egg production, he quipped, "It's time for the comrades in charge to leave our laying hen in peace so she can provide us with enough eggs by her own efforts...
...year is 1992. Gorbachev has been overthrown, and the Soviet empire has fallen apart. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals...
...second scenario of Soviet catastrophe is a coup from the Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia...
Forget the warm smiles and bonhomie that usually attend summitry. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra and his Salvadoran counterpart, Alfredo Cristiani, kept their distance during photo opportunities, and the 20 hours of negotiations sometimes grew strained. But when the five Central American Presidents emerged from their seventh regional summit near San Jose, Costa Rica, they signed a final communique that referred to a common commitment to nudging a stalled peace process...