Word: perestroikas
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...thinking from the 1970s still dominates on certain issues of American foreign policy. The misguided mission also seemed intended to send a distinctly ominous signal to the Soviet Union, quite out of keeping with the one Bush had sought to convey a few days earlier in Malta. Gorbachev and perestroika may fail. The U.S.S.R. may revert to its misbehavior of the past. But the Kremlin should beware: the U.S. is hedging its bets with good old-fashioned triangular diplomacy; however often its existence has been denied, the infamous China card is available for whatever poker games the future may have...
...reinvigoration and the fears of those, no doubt including comrades who voted for him, who worried that he would jeopardize the power and privileges of the elite. He has been a political dynamo, showering sparks inside and outside the country. His commitment to the still elusive goal of perestroika, his effort to make the economy produce what the people want to consume, and glasnost, an end to systematic official lying, have transformed the Soviet Union and made possible a transformation of international relations as well. What were long called, and accurately so, the satellites, or captive nations of Eastern Europe...
...restoration of discipline. It took two years for him to discover that the problems were much deeper and that the solutions would have to be much more far-reaching and disruptive. He realized, he said, that "cosmetic measures" would not work, and so "we arrived at the concept of perestroika as the revolutionary renovation of socialism, of our entire society." What this grand but vague formulation has meant in practice is the scaling back of coercion and the introduction of an unprecedented, until recently unimaginable degree of pluralism. As he put it in his 1987 book Perestroika, "It is possible...
Gorbachev had played a pivotal role in heading off bloodshed. Visiting East Berlin on Oct. 7, the 40th anniversary of the communist state, Gorbachev cautioned the leaders that they could not count on Soviet support if they used force to crack down, and advised them to launch their own perestroika: "Life itself punishes those who delay." Eleven days later, Honecker was forced out and replaced by Krenz, who immediately sought to appease the marching crowds and the demands from his party for faster reform. His tenure was brief but memorable, if only because he ordered the opening of the Berlin...
...their own futures in their jobs and in political organizations. He told Moscow editors in September 1988 that he wanted to "rid public opinion of such a harmful complex as faith in the 'good Czar,' the all-powerful center, the notion that someone can bring about order and organize perestroika from on high." His revamping of the legislative organs of the government offered just such an opportunity to assault the old conveyor-belt way of doing things...