Word: gorbachevized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That is just the point -- reform has been marginal -- and it explains Gorbachev's latest, boldest move. Next month will be the fifth anniversary of his ascension. By Soviet reckoning it is the end of Gorbachev's personal first five-year plan. It is therefore a time of judgment. The judgment is harsh. The lot of the Soviet consumer is not just stagnating but deteriorating. Efficiency, incentive, initiative, competitiveness, productivity, quality, pride, "self-accountability" -- these new buzz words are beginning to sound as hollow as the old slogans about the glory of socialist labor...
...exhortations of its reformist rulers, the Soviet Union still has a command economy and a totalitarian political system. Managers instinctively wait for orders from above; regional leaders still look to Moscow; and everyone looks to the party, to that body that met and argued and finally bent to Gorbachev's will in Moscow last week: the Central Committee. The very word center has connotations in Russian with which Gorbachev is doing battle as he prepares for his next five years, for Perestroika...
Decentralization may be the order of the day, but centralization has been a fact of life for decades. Old habits and old fears die hard, especially when the Communist Party is there to keep them alive. That is why Gorbachev and his principal advisers have concluded that further reform and the continued existence of an all-powerful party are incompatible. Modernization requires the devolution of central power; the party, by its irredeemable nature, resists that devolution. Gorbachev has decided that the party is an obstacle to Perestroika II. Something had to give, and it gave last week...
What about those other reasons, so persuasive sounding a short time ago, why Gorbachev would not do what he has now done? What about the party as the glue that keeps the empire together? An adviser to Gorbachev says the back-to-back crises in the Baltics and the Caucasus were a disabusing revelation for him. He saw Lithuanian Communists declare their independence from the central party. The Lithuanian party was playing a leading role all right; it was leading the way to secession. And then, at the height of the civil war in Azerbaijan, angry citizens of Baku tore...
What about Gorbachev's own party card and what it means to him? For some time there has been reason to wonder whether, in the 3 o'clock in the morning of his soul, Mikhail Sergeyevich really is a Communist, or at least, in the Soviet sense, a "good" Communist. Certainly many in his audience at the Kremlin were worrying about that last week. Glasnost is an unabashedly antimonopolistic, antitotalitarian, therefore anti-Communist notion. Calling for a "revolution of the mind" before his meeting with the Pope in December, Gorbachev said, "We no longer think that we are the best...