Word: perestroikas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Deputies, which holds its inaugural session on May 25. The strong showing by reformist candidates gave Gorbachev the proof he needed to persuade skeptical party functionaries that the solution to the country's economic woes lies in accelerating reforms, not braking them. "The elections unequivocally said yes to perestroika," Gorbachev told the plenum. Added he: "We should have enough courage and ability to pursue consistently the line we have marked out under difficult conditions...
...when their divisions are already on the attack. Said he: "Some have already gone so far as to say in effect that democracy and glasnost are very nearly a disaster. The fact that people . . . no longer want to remain silent and insist on making demands is viewed as taking perestroika too far. I for one, comrades, see this as a success of perestroika...
...full in the Soviet press. Yuri Solovyov, the Leningrad regional party boss who had lost his uncontested election race for the new legislature, charged that Kremlin initiatives like the antialcoholism campaign and the program to foster cooperative businesses had been carried out with "inconsistency, haste and insufficient thought." Of perestroika, Solovyov said, the "minuses still significantly exceed the pluses." Moscow Mayor Valeri Saikin, another election loser, questioned whether democracy had not come to mean "everything is permitted...
...Vladimir Melnikov, the party boss from the Komi region, in the northeastern part of the Russian Republic. He charged that today's problems could not simply be attributed to past leaders. "We are duty bound to admit that many mistakes and miscalculations have been made in the years of perestroika too." In fact, he wondered if the real truth were being kept from Gorbachev by aides who were "clearly guarding the General Secretary from the severity of the situation...
Long a source of grim jokes and bitter complaints by the Soviet public, the chronic shortage of many consumer goods has only worsened under perestroika. Nonetheless, the Kremlin has been reluctant to dip into its hard-currency reserves (around $40 billion, according to Western estimates) to buy consumer goods from the West. But faced with rising discontent, Deputy Minister of Trade Suren Sarukhanov announced last week that the Soviet Union has signed contracts with companies from ten foreign countries to supply products with a retail value of some $2 billion in the hopes of at least temporarily quelling demand. Among...