Word: perestroikas
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Nothing causes more alarm for Russians than the prospect of a bleak winter without food. Famine has recurred with frightening regularity during seven decades of communist rule. "Hunger did not start with perestroika," explains Dmitri Pushkar, a deputy on the Yaroslavl regional council, who monitors food supplies in the countryside. "It began with the coming of Soviet power." Vadim, a local taxi driver, puts it more bluntly: "I remember the postwar famine of 1947, when we had nothing to eat but nettles and goose feet. So what else...
...brother's death ((in 1982)), I began to reflect more deeply. We did not use the word Stalinism to describe it, but we did believe that the socialist system had been deformed. We wanted to introduce reforms similar to those of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union -- glasnost and perestroika. It was at this time that my opposition to the regime began...
...Communists also appear to have helped themselves to the government's gold stocks. When perestroika started, Western estimates put Soviet gold reserves at 2,500 to 3,500 tons. In January 1990, said former Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov last week, the country had 784 tons. After the August coup failed, Russian officials announced ominously that "a certain amount of gold is missing." In September, Grigori Yavlinsky, Gorbachev's top economic adviser, claimed that two-thirds of the gold reserves had been sold abroad in 1990, leaving only 240 tons...
...files. Your plan will turn into a terrible tragedy. I have thought about your idea too -- the one with the state of emergency. I have thought it out, and I am convinced that it is a disastrous path, and a bloody one. It leads us back to the pre-perestroika time...
...before he was chosen to replace Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary, Gorbachev was so frustrated with the party's self-satisfied sclerosis that he told his wife, "((The country)) just can't go on like this." Despite her commitment to her husband's reforms, Raisa admits that so far perestroika "has given us much and very little...