Word: gorbachevized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conventional wisdom was promulgated by Kremlin and Kremlinologists alike. Yes, Gorbachev had created the conditions for the end of one-party rule in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria by putting the regimes there on notice that they were on their own. But no, he could not, would not and probably should not give up the Communist monopoly in his own country...
...reasoning went like this. Despite his disillusion with "Soviet reality" and his aspirations for "humanitarian socialism," Gorbachev was neither Thomas Jefferson nor Vaclav Havel. He was Yuri Andropov's protege, the Stavropol chieftain who came to the big city and made good. He was still thought to be a devout Communist, a true believer in a creed that is, in its essence, monopolistic: there is one truth about how society should be ordered, and therefore one source of authority...
Then there was the imperial imperative for preserving the party's unchallenged position. While Gorbachev might have been willing to cut loose the U.S.S.R.'s colonies beyond its borders, he was also a Soviet patriot -- and besides, he valued his own skin. Therefore, he was emphatically not willing to let his sprawling, fractious country come apart at the seams and thus give his enemies the excuse they were looking for to cast him onto the dustheap of history...
...party, it was often said (including by one of Gorbachev's closest advisers as recently as November), was the one "all-union" institution that could exert the gravitational pull necessary to counteract the many centrifugal forces. Superimpose a multiparty system on a multinational empire, and soon Moscow would be the capital of a rump state called Russia...
...only a gleam in the eyes of the Yeltsinite radicals. Serious competition for the Communists is still probably a long way off. (Of course, the way events move these days, that could mean several months.) But the principle of real democracy has been established; Gorbachev has dragged his comrades, many of them kicking and screaming, across a Rubicon...