Word: gorbachev
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DOES HE DARE TO DRINK A TOAST? Novelist Valentin Rasputin strikes many as an odd choice to serve on Mikhail Gorbachev's new advisory presidential council. Rasputin's writings and speeches are often chauvinistically Russian and, according to some, anti-Semitic. But officials in Moscow think they have discovered the reason for Rasputin's elevated post. Raisa Gorbachev is a big fan of his books. A question now making the Kremlin rounds: Does every Czarina need her Rasputin...
More defeats for Gorbachev and his reforms? Not necessarily. The Supreme Soviet may have done him a favor. He had given only tepid support to the program presented by Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in late May; in fact, many Western experts believe Gorbachev had little to do with fine-tuning it. Almost immediately, the plan's half measures were attacked by conservatives and liberals alike. When the advance warning of price increases set off panic ( buying across the country, the Kremlin lost enthusiasm for the proposals...
Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoli Lukyanov, Gorbachev's deputy, took last week's votes philosophically. Economic reform, he said, "is a new revolution. Of course it needs perfecting." Just before adjourning for the summer, parliament instructed the government to come back with a new package in the fall. The next plan, the Supreme Soviet urged, should be far bolder in cutting government spending, deregulating economic activity and decontrolling prices...
Meanwhile the legislators affirmed Gorbachev's decree powers as President and called on him to use them to break up monopolies, sell state property and establish a banking system. This, says Ed Hewett, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, amounts almost to a vote of confidence and gives Gorbachev the option to "move quickly toward a market economy" -- if he wants...
...Soviet President also reclaimed the initiative in his struggle with the forces of nationalism and separatism. He had been visibly dismayed when his populist nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, won election as chairman of the Russian Federation's Supreme Soviet and engineered a declaration of the republic's desire for "sovereignty." Gorbachev countered by ordering up a commission to draft a new treaty that would establish a loose federation among the 15 Soviet republics, providing each of them with economic "sovereignty." In a show of goodwill, he partly eased the natural-gas embargo against breakaway Lithuania. After meeting with the leaders...