Word: communisme
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...Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy initiatives, Talbott and Isaacson were suddenly struck by a tantalizing question: What effect will all this have on the cold war? Associate Editor Thomas Sancton, meanwhile, was grappling with another puzzle, this one posed by Gorbachev's dramatic domestic reforms: Was the face of Communism changing in the U.S.S.R.? TIME's attempt to answer those two questions resulted in this week's cover stories assessing the first 28 months of the Gorbachev...
...this summer looks much as it has for decades: office workers queuing up at street-side ice cream stands, red-kerchiefed flocks of Young Pioneers fidgeting in the mile-long line outside Lenin's Tomb, old women sweeping courtyards with twig-bundle brooms, faded red signs proclaiming VICTORY TO COMMUNISM. But beneath the capital's seedy, socialist exterior there is an unaccustomed hum of excitement. Passersby pore over posted copies of Moscow News, marveling at articles on (gasp!) official corruption and incompetence. Once banned abstract paintings hang at an outdoor Sunday art fair. In public parks and private living rooms...
Meanwhile, what is by Soviet standards a spectacular thaw has got under way in the cultural domain. During the past year more than a dozen previously banned movies have been screened before fascinated audiences. On the stage, plays like Mikhail Shatrov's Dictatorship of Conscience examine past failures of Communism. Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a novel that chronicles the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, appeared in a literary journal after going unpublished for two decades. Last month a group of ex-political prisoners and dissident writers applied for permission to publish their own magazine, aptly titled...
...change in the Kremlin's rhetoric should not be seen as a sign that the Soviets have abandoned their belief in Communism or become converts to the West. The new tack seems motivated mainly by a realization that military competition and Third World adventurism are expensive and not all that rewarding. Keeping Cuba afloat costs the Soviets more than $4 billion a year; the Afghanistan occupation requires the deployment of close to 120,000 troops; the military budget consumes, according to some estimates, about 14% of total government spending. Gorbachev's domestic objectives will demand a massive reallocation of resources...
...there, then, any reason to believe that Gorbachev's talk of "mutual security" is more credible? In theory at least, there is one significant difference. The Khrushchev-Brezhnev doctrine proclaimed that the armed truce between the superpowers did not mean the end of the global "war" between Communism and capitalism. As Khrushchev said in 1963, "Peaceful coexistence not only does not exclude the class struggle, but is itself a form of the class struggle between victorious socialism and decrepit capitalism." Khrushchev also put this point in more typically blunt terms: "We will bury you." The "wars of national liberation" that...