Word: gorbachevized
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Then along came Mikhail Gorbachev, who has his own reasons for scaling back the U.S.S.R.'s foreign entanglements: they are expensive, diverting resources that might otherwise go to domestic reform; and they provoke worldwide antagonism at a time when Moscow is looking for capitalist goods and credits. So Gorbachev has withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan, encouraged the Vietnamese to end their occupation of Cambodia and warned Fidel Castro that the Kremlin will not indefinitely underwrite the export of revolution in Latin America...
...both countries, Bush will find the disjuncture between economic and political progress that has, in very different ways, plagued Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost-led revolution as well as Deng Xiaoping's marketplace-led revolt. Poland combines robust political competition with a downtrodden economy almost too far gone for reform. Hungary combines an explosion of private enterprise with a less vigorous attitude toward democracy. The message the U.S. and its West European allies can bring to both places is the truth that lies at the heart of democratic capitalism: economic and political freedoms work best in tandem...
Under the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet Union declared that socialism was irreversible, which translated into a decree that its Warsaw Pact neighbors not be allowed to free themselves of Communist clutches. Hence the tanks of 1956 and 1968. Now comes the Gorbachev Doctrine, as articulated in his 1988 U.N. speech: "Freedom of choice is a universal principle that . . . applies both to the capitalist and the socialist system...
Does this mean that the Soviets will let Poland and Hungary drift as far as they want? Even Gorbachev might not know the answer to that question. What seems likely now is that Moscow may tolerate Poland's political pluralism and Hungary's economic experimentation, but it will be tempted to intervene if either seemed about to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and expel Soviet troops...
These days, the Soviet Union and its capital evoke less mystery and fewer perturbations than they did eight years ago. Gorbachev and glasnost have helped see to that. But Smith's formula for success ought to remain valid if a suitable substitution can be found for step 3. In Polar Star, Smith finds it. One dead body leads to others, along an arc of increasing menace and violence. Arkady Renko, the intrepid police investigator of Gorky Park, reappears, again called to rescue a situation that shadowy, powerful forces may not want to be saved...