Word: gorbachevized
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Coal miners walking off their jobs from the Ukraine to the Arctic Circle. Ethnic gangs battling in Georgia. Thousands of other dissatisfied workers threatening strikes. "The situation," said Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev last week as he surveyed the turmoil rocking his vast country, "is fraught with dangerous political and economic consequences." The question for Gorbachev: Will the "revolution from below," which he has been urging on his laggard countrymen, help accelerate his ambitious plans for reform -- or tear the U.S.S.R. apart...
...last week, he proposed his own partial answer. If the party was blocking change by clinging to conservative attitudes, he lectured, then "a purge should take place, a purge was needed." He called for "an influx of fresh forces" affecting every level from factory collectives to the Politburo. Vowed Gorbachev: "This concerns everyone...
...north and Karaganda in the Kazakhstan Republic in Central Asia. And there were rumblings that railroad workers might join in on Aug. 1, an action that could paralyze the country. "Such developments create a threat to the realization of the great plans we have decided upon," warned Gorbachev, referring to his economic-reform program...
...electrifying speed. The first 77 Kuzbass coal miners walked off the job in Mezhdurechensk on July 10. The following day 12,000 workers from five mines in the area joined them. They drew up a list of demands, including better pay, more vacation, higher pensions. Their overriding complaint: despite Gorbachev's calls for greater local autonomy in managing the economy, bureaucrats in Moscow continued to wield arbitrary control over the mines and were holding back the bulk of their profits. Many local officials openly sympathized with the strikers. "Why not? They breathe the same air we do," said Timuras Avaliani...
Strikes are not technically illegal in the Soviet Union; the Marxist tenet that they are unnecessary in a proletarian paradise has not kept them from happening. Until the Gorbachev era, Communist rulers used bullets or gifts of consumer goods to quell unruly workers. But under the impact of perestroika and glasnost, work stoppages have become part of the economic landscape...