Word: perestroika
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Some of Gorbachev's most hostile critics are among those whose help he needs to make perestroika work: the 18 million members of the nomenklatura, or ruling class. Says Eldar Shakhbazov, deputy minister of finance in Azerbaijan: "The first layer of opponents of perestroika are people who would lose their economic privileges." Not only might they be shifted to less desirable jobs, but the nomenklatura fears that reform may also eliminate the perks -- special stores, food sources, even schools -- that make them the Soviet Union's pampered elite. Those privileges are a touchy matter. When Pravda published a letter from...
...more theoretical level, perestroika has been attacked by conservative intellectuals who improbably combine a nationalist nostalgia for Russian Orthodoxy and the Stalin era with a xenophobic hatred of corrupt Western influences on Soviet life. Many of these critics belong to the Writers' Union of the Russian Federal Republic, the largest of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 constituent republics. The literary monthly Nash Sovremennik has denounced rock music and beauty pageants as demeaning influences on Russian culture. Such writers as Yuri Bondarev and Vasily Belov have attacked the de-Stalinization process for defaming a period when, despite Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet...
...Gorbachev has outmaneuvered his critics within the party hierarchy. His control of the media means that, even under glasnost, opposition to perestroika gets limited voice. Yet by now it is clear that unless Gorbachev can inspire widespread public support for the reform process -- no sure thing -- his attempt to shake down the old trees will be truncated before it has a chance to grow...
...talk show, has a reputation for being a glasnost groundbreaker, but few who tuned in one Wednesday evening nearly a year ago were quite prepared for what happened. During a debate about making the political system more democratic, a novel notion came up. Why not unite people who support perestroika into something resembling the popular-front movements that lobbied for social reforms in Europe during the 1930s? For a moment, the question hung in the air. Nothing like it had ever been tried in the Soviet Union. Telephone lines soon jangled with enthusiastic offers of support. When the broadcast ended...
...policies. Such debate as does occur is carried on in Aesopian language, and history is currently the favored supplier of code words. Thus when Yegor Ligachev and other conservatives cry that denunciations of Stalin are shaking people's faith in the Soviet system, they are really saying that perestroika and glasnost are going too far. Gorbachev's partisans get the point, and respond with redoubled attacks on Stalin and his admirers today...