Word: gorbachevized
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They did, but his victory was a far cry from the 99.9% landslides once manufactured for Soviet leaders. Now allowed to vote their own minds, 495 Deputies opposed Gorbachev, 54 abstained, another 122 walked off with their ballots to protest the undemocratic spectacle and as many as 245 failed to participate at all. Against no competition, he won with a victory majority of only...
Popularly elected he was not, but Mikhail Gorbachev nevertheless swore himself in last week as the first real President the U.S.S.R. has ever had. As the parliamentarians at the third session of the Congress of People's Deputies rose to their feet, Gorbachev walked from his seat to a small table by a red hammer-and-sickle flag. Placing his right hand on a copy of the Soviet constitution, he intoned, "I solemnly swear to serve faithfully the peoples of our country, to strictly abide by the constitution of the U.S.S.R., to guarantee the rights and freedoms of our citizens...
...seven decades Soviets have heard countless promises from their Communist leaders, but never an official oath to honor the constitution. The document in question was an outdated product of the Brezhnev era. Gorbachev's new office, and the expanded powers that go along with it, were won by parliamentary, not popular, vote. But there was no denying the fact that almost five years to the day after he assumed the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev had engineered nothing less than a coup d'etat, effectively ending his party's monopoly on power. Said...
Some Soviets complained that Gorbachev's accession to executive power hardly resembled true democracy. Others grumbled that his political changes have brought precious little improvement to a distressed economy. Gorbachev would probably win election if tested at the polls -- for want of a real alternative. Yet despite his sweeping new powers, he faces a populace disenchanted with his failure to fulfill the promises he has made and increasingly skeptical that he is moving radically enough...
...continue to live according to the laws of a madhouse." Conservative Deputies warned that society was "slipping into a swamp even more boggy than in the stagnation period." At one point Deputy Teimuraz Avaliani, from a Siberian coal-mining region, even urged the parliamentarians "not to vote for Gorbachev under any circumstances...