Word: lenin
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...Soviet Union would be a Third World country. There is a note of alarm, even shame, and a growing tone of impatience in the way he talks about the society and economy over which he presides. A new specter haunts the land of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the specter of apostasy imposed from above. What Gorbachev calls a "revolution" is to be accomplished by the beginning of the 21st century, and he seems to have every intention of being around, and in power, to pronounce it a success...
...treats the people it rules. The Kremlin would have to justify its authority by focusing on the needs and aspirations of its citizens rather than by pursuing expansionist aims. In addition, the Soviets would need to abandon the notion that their security depends on threatening the security of others. Lenin's old dictum of kto-kogo (who-whom) -- or who will prevail over whom -- would have to give way to a concept of live and let live...
...even deeper connection between Gorbachev's domestic reforms and his proclaimed foreign policy goals. "I don't remember who," Gorbachev said in his 1985 interview with TIME, "but somebody said that foreign policy is a continuation of domestic policy." That tenet, as he no doubt knew, was from Lenin: "There is no more erroneous or harmful idea than the separation of foreign from internal policy...
...could alter the U.S. side of the equation. At the heart of American animosity toward the Soviet Union is a revulsion against its internal system, a belief that there is something cruel and unnatural about the relationship between the individual and the state under the precepts of Marx and Lenin. "Gorbachev seems to be rethinking precisely those things that we don't like about the Soviet Union," says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If glasnost thrives, the place could change in ways that will make it easier for us to treat...
Such worries about Gorbachev's ultimate goals involve another Leninist byword: peredyshka (breathing space). Both Lenin and Stalin were adept at justifying tactical retreats and temporary accommodations when these suited Soviet aims, only to return to the global struggle when conditions ripened. "The No. 1 question," says James Schlesinger, "is whether Gorbachev's new thinking is intended simply to achieve a respite, a pause, so that the Soviets can repair their economy; then in ten or 15 years go back to the ideological conflict...