Word: gorbachevized
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...Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great...
...whose name was so often taken in vain by their rulers -- longed for a leader with verve and vision, someone who would represent their pride rather than their shame. There was, therefore, a national murmur of interest in 1979, when the country got its first look at Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev at a televised awards ceremony. Not only did this new Central Committee Secretary, then 48, seem at ease among the ruling septuagenarians; he was the only one able to say thank you for his medal without reading from a 3-by-5 card...
Since his selection as party chief in 1985, Gorbachev has exceeded both the hopes of those who longed for reinvigoration and the fears of those, no doubt including comrades who voted for him, who worried that he would jeopardize the power and privileges of the elite. He has been a political dynamo, showering sparks inside and outside the country. His commitment to the still elusive goal of perestroika, his effort to make the economy produce what the people want to consume, and glasnost, an end to systematic official lying, have transformed the Soviet Union and made possible a transformation...
...Gorbachev did not invent the idea of trying to reinvent communism, but during his formative years in obscurity he certainly learned a lesson about the connection between internal reform and international relations. He had seen Nikita Khrushchev's vigorous cultural thaw of the late 1950s freeze again in the intensified cold war that followed the Cuban missile crisis. Alexei Kosygin, who was Prime Minister until his death in 1980, attempted to reorient heavy industry toward consumer goods, decentralization and profitmaking in the mid-1960s. But, ironically, that program was aborted partly because the Soviet crackdown on "socialism with a human...
...intellectual and biographical origins of Gorbachev's radicalism will probably always be a mystery. In a way, they become more mysterious as time goes on, if only because he becomes more radical. The sweeping changes he has instigated this past year in the U.S.S.R., particularly free expression and democratization, and his transfusion of counterrevolution into Eastern Europe would shock not only the late Andrei Gromyko, who nominated Gorbachev for the general secretaryship in 1985, but the Gorbachev of five years ago as well...