Word: gorbachev
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Fidgety and intent, Mikhail Gorbachev sat on the edge of his leather chair in the presidential box near the front of the Kremlin Hall of Meetings. He wiped his glasses, sipped tea and thumbed a scarlet folder while waiting to take center stage before the Supreme Soviet...
Parliamentary Deputies had assembled last week to hear the contents of the revolution-red binder in Gorbachev's hands: nothing less than a plan to make over the system bequeathed by Lenin, salvage a once proud country from chaos and lead it to the semblance of a Western-style market economy. Even before Gorbachev began to speak, however, his proposal had become a lightning rod for protest from radical reformers. In a week in which the Soviet President had won the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the world, he was fated to be awarded criticism at home for not worrying...
...enough. When his stratagem was made public three days before the official presentation, thunderings of outrage rolled in from the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's largest republic, which intends to begin its own 500-day crash conversion to a free market on Nov. 1. Calling the Gorbachev plan "deliberate deception" in its finances and a likely "catastrophe," Russian leader and maverick reformer Boris Yeltsin reaffirmed his commitment to more drastic measures. In a chilling allusion to last December's Romanian upheaval, Yeltsin wondered, "Do they intend to wait until the people take to the streets to have their...
...Russian Orthodox priest blessing Moscow's new commodities exchange, to U.S. film star and fitness diva Jane Fonda leading a troop of Soviet women on an athletic loop around the Kremlin. Yet as loudspeakers blared "Hoorah, hoorah!" for Fonda outside the old czarist citadel, inside no outright cheers greeted Gorbachev's shape-up course. Legislators adopted the program by a vote of 333 to 12 (with 34 abstentions) but remained unsure as to exactly what the plan would accomplish. Still, the scheme's preamble sets a clear objective. While making a token half-nod to Marx -- "The transition...
...question remained: How to get there? Though the latest presidential plan is the first to bear Gorbachev's imprimatur, it capped a series of four previous Kremlin formulas to be brought out and then discarded since last December like so many bottles of vodka at a wild bash. What especially angered Yeltsin and other crash reformers was their feeling that Gorbachev had betrayed them, first by saying he approved of the 500-Day Plan devised by a team under presidential councilor and economist Stanislav Shatalin, then by opting for a much vaguer, slower schedule outlined by Gorbachev adviser Abel Aganbegyan...