Word: gorbachev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WORLD: Sakharov is gone, but Gorbachev still faces opposition...
...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...
...Soviet Union if perestroika falls apart. Last September, for example, political oppositionist Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss, repeatedly warned of an impending disaster. "We are on the edge of an abyss," Yeltsin told a rapt audience at New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Yeltsin gave Gorbachev until next fall to produce results. Others have warned of an actual civil war by then...
Such radicalism would not be possible without Gorbachev's glasnost. But the new openness in the Soviet media has also exposed irrational superstitions reminiscent of the last days of Czar Nicholas II. The TASS news agency reports with a straight face that aliens stepped out of UFOs in Voronezh. On TV, psychic healers appear frequently with supposed cures for everything from obesity to detached retinas. As in all periods of great stress, the Christian churches in Russia have seldom been fuller...
...Gorbachev's own vision remains that of a Soviet Union that is sufficiently open to be honest about its problems but sufficiently centralized to remain a powerful Leninist state. The trouble is, how many other Soviet citizens share it? The glasnost he unleashed has turned into a dangerous tiger for 280 million people to ride. If Gorbachev offers no realistic alternative to continued Leninism, he may be forced to try caging it once more -- which he probably will -- or to face the dissolution of the "socialist sixth of the earth...