Word: perestroikas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...issue during the June meetings will be the future pace of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), the twin towers of Gorbachev's ambitious program of internal reform. It is crucial to him that the 5,000 delegates to the party conference represent what he likes to call "new thinking." U.S. analysts note that the Soviet leader has achieved remarkable success in shaking up a hidebound leadership. According to one estimate, during his three years in office Gorbachev has replaced 40% of the Central Committee, 90 of the 157 regional first secretaries and 72 of 101 members of the Council...
Gorbachev has put the leaders of all those countries on notice that as the Soviet Union turns its attention and resources to perestroika at home, it is not going to throw good money after bad abroad. Pro-Soviet regimes will thus be forced to do some restructuring of their own. To some extent that means demilitarizing their economies and therefore their foreign policies. This has already caused strains with Cuban Leader Fidel Castro, who managed to miss two of Gorbachev's speeches during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union in Moscow last November...
...last week's unrest and the force used to quell it must have had a profoundly disquieting effect on the Soviet Union and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The economic reform measures at the center of the Polish dispute, after all, are the local version of Gorbachev's campaign of perestroika (restructuring), and early setbacks in a key satellite hardly bode well for the vaster and still more intractable economy of the Soviet Union. The proximate cause of the wave of strikes in Poland was the imposition of price hikes, ranging from 40% for food staples to 100% for utility charges...
...Russian Republic, he spent the Brezhnev years as local party boss in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Brought back to Moscow by then Party Leader Yuri Andropov in 1983, Ligachev was named to Gorbachev's Politburo two years later. All along, Ligachev has insisted he does not oppose perestroika. In an extraordinary interview with the Paris daily Le Monde in December he said, "I know what you write about me. I beg you to understand that there is no difference between ((Gorbachev and me)); we are on the same wavelength." Observed a Western diplomat in Moscow last week...
Gorbachev recognizes the difference between resistance to his policies and outright opposition. Earlier this month the Soviet leader acknowledged that perestroika "has simply frightened people; quite a few have lost their bearings." Even so, he went on, he was not about to back off: "We have every reason to say that the decisive struggle for the success of perestroika has begun." And it will go on with a team more precisely tailored to the boss's wishes...