Word: gorbachev
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...Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher Inc. -- think of the attention a consulting firm with that name would command! MARGARET THATCHER certainly thinks so. The former British Prime Minister wants to team up with the other two ex-leaders in a "supertroika" to dole out advice on global affairs. "We managed to do a lot for world peace and democracy," she explained to the BBC. A senior British Cabinet Minister who views her plan as a slap at the successors to the three leaders calls Thatcher's idea "barmy." In any case, the troika has only one member so far: Gorbachev and Reagan...
...would have been a catastrophic mistake to provide large-scale assistance to the former Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. Dominated by communist hard-liners until the August 1991 coup, hostile to free elections and self- determination for the nations of the Soviet Union, and addicted to economic half measures, his government adopted reforms to strengthen the communist system, not to abandon it. With the final lowering of the red flag of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, that situation changed decisively. The Soviet people finally achieved their deepest aspiration -- not reform under communism but reform without communism. Unfortunately, the West...
Most dismaying of all to the majority of Soviet people, Gorbachev did not deliver on his promise that perestroika would bring efficiency to the socialist system and prosperity to the country. Instead, as he admitted last week, "the old system fell apart even before the new system began to work." In fact, there was no new system. In September 1990 he announced he favored the so-called 500-Day Plan for a sudden switch to a free-market system. But then he lost his nerve and reneged, opting for a "compromise" between dramatic change and another round of tentative tinkering...
...resignation, Gorbachev was still talking about finding some blend of central planning and market economics that he called a "multi- tier economy" with "an equality of all forms of ownership." No such halfway house exists, and his protracted attempt to find one left the irrational centralized system in chaos, with no replacement in sight. Ordinary citizens paid the price for his procrastination...
...Gorbachev bows out, but his honored place in world history is guaranteed. He even hints he may be planning a comeback rather sooner than later...