Word: gorbachevized
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They should worry less about what Gorbachev will do next, or what the tiger he is riding will do to him. Leave that to Gorbachev. He has done fairly well so far. Besides, he has certainly made monkeys out of the experts and prophets...
...internationalism, a new geopolitics that prepares the West, and perhaps the West and East together, to manage the looming problems that will make the chapter now beginning every bit as challenging as the one, mercifully, coming to an end. Whether the new period will be known as the Gorbachev era belongs to that category of unanswerable questions on which it is better not to waste time. But whatever the next stage of history comes to be called, there is no question that Gorbachev has made it possible...
...more than four decades, Western policy has been based on a grotesque exaggeration of what the U.S.S.R. could do if it wanted, therefore what it might do, therefore what the West must be prepared to do in response. Gorbachev has shown that, in some respects, where the West thought the Soviet Union was strong, it was in fact weak. The spectacle of this past year -- often exhilarating, sometimes chaotic and in Tiananmen Square horrifying -- has revealed a brittleness in the entire communist system, whether the armed and uniformed minions of the state ended up snipping barbed wire, as they...
...Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of "stagnation." Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev personifies to his own people, and should personify to the outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history: Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including much...
...result of that mix is the disaster that Gorbachev faces today. The combination of totalitarianism, or "command-administrative methods," and bureaucracy has stultified Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is trying to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic political institutions that have been developing in the West while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own dead end, particularly during the lost years of the Brezhnev period...