Word: perestroikas
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Only two years ago, President Gorbachev was urging the Soviet people to be bold, to show initiative, to carry out demokratizatsiya at all levels. "Perestroika," he said, "is a revolution." That definition may have seemed all too literal to him last week as the marching Muscovites disobeyed him to prove their support for his main rival, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Just as ominously, thousands of striking miners, from the Ukraine to western Siberia, were also resorting to politics, and joined their city cousins in demanding Gorbachev's resignation...
Mikhail Gorbachev may hold out hope for the return of perestroika, but he won't be getting much encouragement. "Among Gorbachev's top advisers, just about everybody is gone," claims John Mroz, president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies. Many other reform-minded leaders have left the country altogether. The latest departure: Boris Fyodorov, the respected finance minister of the Russian republic, who will take up a job in London later this month at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Most of Gorbachev's policy shapers have been replaced by unknowns from the Central Committee's ideology...
...Stalinist era, Yeltsin would probably have been shot for his insubordination. Under perestroika, though, he made an astonishing political comeback, running as Moscow's at-large candidate for the newly created Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 and winning 89% of the city's 6 million votes. From that political base, he sniped constantly at Gorbachev for his "half-measures" and indecisiveness, and called for direct presidential elections...
Although a sense of urgency pervades this book, one realizes that Sakharov acknowledges many personal accomplishments, even if he has failed to fulfill all of his plans. At every turn Sakharov describes another setback for perestroika and predicts that without real reform the Soviet Union will descend into anarchy or renewed despotism. He specifically warns against increasing the Soviet government's authority, even if the head of the central government is the architect of perestroika...
Sakharov realized that as the two icons of Soviet opposition, he and Solzhenitsyn felt a deep responsibility to the Soviet people. His constant work for freedom, even against those who purported to be refashioning Soviet society, showed him to be one of the real leaders of perestroika. Because of Gorbachev's caution, the U.S.S.R. is now even more of a shambles than when perestoika began. Would that Gorbachev had listened to this physicist-prophet before his chances faded...