Word: gorbachevized
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...Gorbachev has not always been a champion of the kind of people power on display in Tiananmen Square. Early in his tenure as General Secretary, his understanding of democracy was closer to Deng's concept of limited managerial and entrepreneurial liberalization. However, the Soviet leader grew to realize that as long as the Communist Party maintains its grip on all aspects of society, significant reform is nearly impossible. The party is too conservative, too resistant to change. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the party was the agent of cataclysmic change -- but on behalf of a conspiratorial elite...
Deng also made himself vulnerable to the supreme, and probably final, irony of his roller-coaster career. He carefully, patiently, skillfully set the scene for Gorbachev to visit China two weeks ago. The Soviet leader was coming on Deng's terms to end the 30-year schism between the Communist giants. Yet not only was this diplomatic triumph overshadowed by the more spectacular events in Tiananmen Square, but the demonstrators there carried banners in Russian demanding glasnost and saying IN THE SOVIET UNION THEY HAVE GORBACHEV. IN CHINA, WE HAVE WHOM...
...word used by a number of his own advisers, Gorbachev was "radicalized" by the experience of trying to improve the system. The result, two months ago, was a genuine choice for voters in the election to the new Congress of People's Deputies. Numerous standard-bearers of the old order were defeated, including some who ran unopposed (they gathered too few votes to qualify for election). A prominent Soviet historian, Leonid Batkin, asserts that "the Communist Party lost as an institution. Communists won not because they were Communists but despite being Communists." The insurgents suffered a setback in last week...
...Gorbachev also has the satisfaction of knowing that he has re-established the pre-eminence of the top man in the Kremlin as the leader of world Communism -- but with a twist. He is now the leader of the Communist reformation. It is as though Martin Luther had returned in triumph to Rome to be installed as Pope...
Deng Xiaoping's predecessor Mao Zedong split with Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev partly on the grounds that Khrushchev was a "revisionist." Gorbachev has gone a long way toward healing the rift, but not by returning to orthodoxy. He has carried revisionism to a level unimagined by either Mao or Khrushchev, and as a result his picture and slogans are on the posters of Chinese demonstrators...