Word: gorbachev
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While Mikhail Gorbachev blasted "communist fundamentalists" from his Kremlin pulpit last week, one of his main targets, Alexei Sergeyev, sat silently in the audience of Central Committee members, nursing a few grievances of his own. As the founder of the hard-line Communist Initiative movement, Sergeyev concluded that what Gorbachev said about "breaking out of the circle of dogmatic concepts" confirmed his worst suspicions. "In the past, Gorbachev has always disguised his true views," said Sergeyev. "This time, he was almost honest. His speech left me in no doubt that he is not a communist. If you were to change...
What particularly incensed Sergeyev and other supporters of traditional Marxist-Leninist doctrine was a draft charter that Gorbachev presented to the plenum of the party leadership -- the first complete restatement of basic principles in 30 years. In Sergeyev's view, Gorbachev's document was too "social democratic," a derogatory term among hard-liners. What he meant was that Gorbachev wanted to abandon basic communist principles. Instead, he has advocated a democratic, parliamentary-style party and a mixed economy. "If the Gorbachev line should triumph," warned Sergeyev, "there will no longer be a Communist Party -- not even in name...
...plenum was not marked this time by bitter personal attacks against Gorbachev. His opponents, said Sergeyev, a professor of political economics at Moscow's Academy of Labor and Social Relations, were trying to stage "a revolt on their knees." There were angry outcries in the hall during the closed sessions, he said, but when the time came to vote, Gorbachev always + won. The General Secretary had trumped his critics by embracing their call for a special congress before the end of the year, thus deflecting their attempts to force an immediate schism in the party or a change of leadership...
There was a time when Gorbachev would not have dared to move so brazenly against the hard-liners. Now he evidently believes that time is running out for them. Party hard-liners have been defeated in almost every major election that has been held during the past two years. While communist rule goes unchallenged in the conservative Central Asian republics, the party is virtually a marginal opposition group in Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic republics. Rank-and-file members across the country are deserting the fold in droves. Some 4 million have left the party during the past 18 months...
Sergeyev fears that if Gorbachev's policies do not finish off the communists, the party's most prominent dropout, Boris Yeltsin, will. In one of his first acts as president of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin banished all party organizations from the workplace and from state institutions. His decree was aimed like an ax at the very roots of communist power: the dense tangle of party cells in factories and businesses that have functioned alongside state agencies as a shadow system of administration. This party bureaucracy has been a major brake on radical economic reforms...