Word: perestroikas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gorbachev has been in power for four years. In some ways, he was running for a second term in last Sunday's election of a new Congress of People's Deputies, seeking a mandate for his three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness) and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Not since the Bolsheviks were trounced in the Constituent Assembly races of November 1917 had citizens of the Soviet Union been given the chance to vote in a real national election. This time some highly visible keepers of the Bolshevik faith fared poorly. But for Gorbachev the results could...
...ousted as Moscow Communist Party boss and candidate member of the Politburo, has become a symbol of the opportunities and obstacles that Gorbachev now faces. Yeltsin's triumph, along with the defeat of party hacks from Siberia to Lithuania, represented a rousing endorsement of Gorbachev's vision of perestroika. But it also represented a feisty revolt against the failure of his reforms to improve the harsh realities of Soviet life...
...perestroika, Gorbachev has made into a mantra the phrase "There is no alternative." Even Ligachev and the conservatives, wary as they are about the mayhem being done to Marxism, agree that something must be done. As Gorbachev well knows, one of the safeguards of perestroika is its links to glasnost: now that the economy's inherent flaws have been aired, it is impossible to retreat and pretend once again not to see them. "The notion that Ligachev or anyone else can bring perestroika to a halt now simply does not square with reality," says Soviet economist Gavril Popov. "Empty store...
...person who may not be so enthusiastic about Mikhail Gorbachev's reforming impulse is Fidel Castro. While Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika earn admiration from both developed and developing countries, Cuba has yet to give its stamp of approval. For Castro, Cuba's leader for the past thirty years, "restructuring" may entail betrayal of the revolution, a return to what he has called "capitalist euphoria...
Whole segments of the East bloc, once firmly under the thumb of Soviet orthodoxy, are launched in headlong pursuit of a new political and economic order. But not all. In Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with...