Word: gorbachev
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Russia's Volsky in some ways is typical: he began working in the military- industrial system in Leonid Brezhnev's day and eventually rose to chief of industry for the Communist Party under Mikhail Gorbachev. His Industrialists' Union claims to represent 70% of the country's state-enterprise managers. In June it joined forces with two other parties, one headed by Yeltsin's Vice President, Alexander Rutskoi, to form Civic Union, which is probably the best- organized political faction in the country. Yeltsin, zigzagging between conservatives and reformers in the same manner he denounced when Gorbachev was doing...
...advanced stage of dry rot. Imagine the Soviet Union if Stalin were still alive and in charge at age 112: that is North Korea, which outsiders have mockingly dubbed "the world's last socialist theme park." It has had no Khrushchev, not even a Brezhnev, never mind a Gorbachev. It has only its founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, who is 80 and failing. "The Great Leader" has designated his son, "the Dear Leader," heir to the throne. But a succession struggle may already have begun...
While a step-by-step, managed transition is to be encouraged, it is not necessarily to be expected. As Gorbachev himself inadvertently demonstrated, reform communism is an oxymoron. The Chinese Communists may ultimately learn the same truth, even though they bought the system some time with blood on Tiananmen Square. The late Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, a great friend of the Great Leader, provided a corollary: the more retrograde and repressive the regime, the more violent its fall. Its strength is brittle; it will not bend, but it will break. Open the door to a country like North Korea...
...surprising that Shevardnadze has seldom had a day off since he returned last March to the small Caucasian republic where he ruled as Communist Party boss before Mikhail Gorbachev summoned him to Moscow in 1985. At a time in life when other senior statesmen would be content to write their memoirs, the 64-year-old diplomat has embarked on the riskiest mission of his career: bringing peace and stability to his homeland. There he daily faces more violence than he did as a major player in the cold war, as Georgia is beset by ethnic rebellions in the independence-minded...
...evidence is potentially so explosive that the hearings, which could last several weeks, have been compared in impact to the postwar Nuremberg trials of Germany's Nazi leaders. But Yeltsin's men say they have no desire to start a witch-hunt against specific party officials, including Gorbachev. "There are no victors and no vanquished," says Shakhrai. "People should be tried only for criminal actions, not because they were members of the party nomenklatura." Another team lawyer, Andrei Makarov, puts it more succinctly: "We do not want to turn these hearings into a political show...