Word: perestroika
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...says, "Staying home." To curl up with a good book? Well, he did read Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which deals with a lot of rich New Yorkers who pursue such vanities as charity dinners at Trumpian apartments. Trump reports that he also recently read Gorbachev's Perestroika. "It was not the most exciting book I ever read, and I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I felt I had an obligation to read it," he recalls. He does not believe, though, that he needs many such exercises to get on in the world. "I can sit down...
Nearly four years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev pledged that the payoff for perestroika (economic restructuring) would be an increase in the quality and availability of consumer goods. So far, to the profound distress of Gorbachev's supporters and the growing impatience of Soviet citizenry, precisely the opposite has taken place. The arrival of the new year, traditionally a time of gift giving and feasting in the Soviet Union, served only to highlight the burgeoning list of products that are hard to find, rationed or simply unavailable. Even Gorbachev sounded dispirited over what has turned into the most severe consumer crisis...
Today the orthodox P.D.R.Y. is embracing a modest version of perestroika. By local standards the reforms are radical: encouraging private farms, welcoming Western investment and reorganizing state-run industry. In the capital of Aden, the latest ruling Politburo has called the country's Central Committee into session to adopt such bold measures as more funding for private and cooperative farms and better pay to spur greater productivity among state farm workers...
...fragile democracies face social unrest and political turmoil if their massive foreign loans are not reduced, but U. S. institutions have yet to come up with many acceptable solutions. -- Why do Australia' s Aborigines die at alarming rates in police custody? -- South Yemen embraces a modest version of perestroika. -- Racial troubles flare in the Chinese city of Nanjing...
...Perestroika, now in its fourth year, seems stalled, and has yet to bring much improvement in economic conditions, with worsening shortages of food and consumer goods. The economy is afflicted by a $58 billion budget deficit, a $12.8 billion cleanup bill after Chernobyl, and serious losses in revenues from declining oil prices and the enforced drop in vodka sales. Now the billions of rubles that will have to be spent on reconstruction of an area about the size of Maryland must be figured in. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov admitted last week that the Soviet leadership "made a mistake" when...