Word: perestroika
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...angry Soviet consumers, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov has come to personify just about everything that is wrong with perestroika. Twice in the past nine months he has tried to come up with an economic plan to save the floundering Soviet economy -- without success. As lines for basic staples, including bread, grow ever longer, confidence in his government has dipped so precipitously that even President Mikhail Gorbachev decided last month to join forces with longtime rival Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian Republic, in drafting an alternative plan. Thus when Ryzhkov stepped to the podium of the Supreme Soviet last week...
...basic goal of Gorbachev's perestroika had been the "restructuring" of centralized socialism; the Shatalin plan aims at the destruction of it, both the centralized aspect and the socialist aspect. Within two years, 70% of the nation's industrial enterprises would be privatized, with stock markets in Moscow and Leningrad trading shares in competitive firms. An even larger proportion -- perhaps 90% -- of businesses in the service and retail trading sectors would be put in private hands. A version of the Shatalin plan circulating in Moscow last week put it bluntly: "Mankind has not succeeded in creating anything more efficient than...
Even for someone as optimistic as Mikhail Gorbachev, the news from the front lines of perestroika these days has been decidedly bleak. The patience of Soviet consumers has become completely shopworn, oil-industry workers are threatening to go on strike, and even army officers grumble publicly about low living standards. While a record harvest lies rotting in the fields, bread -- that staple of Russian life -- has joined the growing list of scarce goods. Meanwhile, pressure mounts for the government of Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov to resign. Most worrisome of all for the Kremlin, the once monolithic Union of Soviet Socialist...
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Soviet officials blame factory breakdowns, hoarding by black marketeers and reduced imports from Bulgaria for the cigarette shortage. The protests are regarded as a real threat to perestroika. Moscow's city council announced last week that it would immediately begin rationing cigarettes, limiting consumption to five packs a month. President Gorbachev fired Vladilen Nikitin, his appropriately named head of state procurement, after finding his explanation for the shortage "unconvincing and unsound." Soviet smokers seem to agree. "It was bad enough when they took our vodka away," grumbled a man in a tobacco line. "There was eau de cologne or home...