Word: gorbachev
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...argument for aid is simple: if the West wants Gorbachev to continue steering the U.S.S.R. toward peace and democracy, then it must help him ward off collapse of the Soviet economy, since that is by far the greatest threat to his remaining in power. So far, however, this has convinced only Kohl, who has pledged $3 billion of West German loans to the Soviet Union and is trying to talk his NATO allies into ponying up an additional $15 billion or so. Colleagues suspect Kohl's real motive is to buy Moscow's consent to German unification...
Soviet negotiators are coming around on the question of their waning role in Afghanistan. If anything, Moscow now seems as anxious as the U.S. to finalize a deal. An agreement has seemed imminent ever since last month's Bush- Gorbachev summit in Washington, and State Department officials believe it could come during the third Two-plus-Four conference in Paris next week. Moscow has sent a delegation to Washington to work out details of President Najibullah's future role, an acceptable election procedure and establishment of a vote-monitoring commission...
...first sign of trouble came barely five minutes after Mikhail Gorbachev opened the 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party last week. A delegate from the far eastern region of Magadan proposed an unprecedented resolution, calling for nothing less than the resignation of the entire Central Committee and its ruling Politburo. The daring delegate also wanted the party leadership to tell the 4,657 delegates why so little had been accomplished since the last party Congress, in February 1986, which had launched Gorbachev's ambitious -- and increasingly beleaguered -- program of perestroika to transform the Soviet Union...
Presiding alone amid dozens of empty chairs on the two-tier tribunal, Gorbachev managed to sidestep that first frontal attack. But there was plenty more Politburo bashing to come in the opening week of the ten-day conclave. Progressives and conservatives argued bitterly over who was responsible for the party's fading power. Nine members of the twelve-member council were forced to give accounts of themselves, and the assembly was not about to let them get away with long-winded, cliche-laden speeches. Where past Kremlin meetings greeted boiler-plate presentations with perfunctory outbursts of applause, this one constantly...
...events on the calendar of perestroika had been invested with so much importance as the 28th Congress. It was supposed to mark the long-awaited - turning point, when reformers would finally seize control of party power from entrenched bureaucrats and release the brakes on radical change. Gorbachev would quit straddling the widening gap between the party's fractious wings and align himself once and for all with democratic liberals. There was also speculation that he might step down as General Secretary and devote full attention to his new presidential office, sealing the shift of power away from the party...