Word: perestroika
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...perestroika has proved to be an epic with many chapters. Based in Moscow for the past year, Carney has covered the backlash against the Soviet President's liberalization. Last January he was with Lithuanian demonstrators at the television tower in Vilnius when Soviet army paratroopers opened fire nearby, killing 15 civilians. Says Carney: "For the first time, it seemed clear that Gorbachev wasn't entirely in control." That sense was reinforced during Carney's visit to the Black Beret base. Says Carney: "To a man, the Black Berets spoke of defending the Soviet system to the end, regardless of Moscow...
...playground has closed. The garrison is dispersing. And with it is going another dejected group: the spy novelists. The cold war, central theme of espionage thrillers, has melted in the warm sun -- and hot air -- of glasnost and perestroika...
...Gorbachev's reforms are taking hold even in the Soviet military. According to U.S. intelligence sources, annual tank production has dropped from 3,500 in 1988 to just 800, and similar cutbacks are taking place on Air Force assembly lines. While the Soviet navy remains the lone holdout against perestroika by continuing a nuclear-carrier program, there are encouraging signs of change there too. The Severodvinsk shipyards have produced a tourist submarine, complete with large glass viewing portholes and devices for picking things up off the ocean floor...
Those weapons, to be sure, are irrelevant to Gorbachev's current preoccupations and divert resources from perestroika. In fact, rather than fretting about a bolt-from-the-blue Soviet attack on the U.S., experts at the CIA and Pentagon have lately been worrying about the much more plausible danger that Soviet tactical nukes, as well as chemical and biological weapons, might end up in the hands of secessionist rebels in the U.S.S.R. or shady merchants in the international arms bazaar. Still, American defense planners cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the Strategic Rocket Forces might pose a threat...
When George Bush took office in January 1989, Gorbachev was in retreat. But was it permanent or tactical? Was perestroika in fact part of a larger strategy of peredyshka -- a "breathing space" that would allow the Soviet Union to reconstitute itself as a more efficient, disciplined and formidable adversary? What about Gorbachev himself? Was he Prometheus or Proteus? And even if one gave him the benefit of every doubt, who, and what, would come after...