Word: perestroikas
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...rejuvenating it. He is a proud Russian nationalist. He likes power, knows how to use it and wants to keep it. His political reforms, glasnost, are totally inadequate compared with a free society. But compared with what the Soviet people had before, the changes are breathtaking. His economic reforms, perestroika, have been an abject failure. For example, in the ten years of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, the per capita income of the Chinese people has doubled. In the five years of Gorbachev's rule, the per capita income of the Russian people has gone down. But while Gorbachev...
...foreign policy becomes less aggressive. Even as he issues calls for "new thinking," Soviet power is being applied against American interests in Afghanistan and El Salvador and for propping up anti- American regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Libya. When Gorbachev asks the U.S. to help pay for perestroika, we should insist he pay for it himself by cutting his budgets for defense and foreign adventures...
...same time, I left the Soviet Union with a sense of deep foreboding. We're getting to a point where Gorbachev and his colleagues will have to make some fundamental choices, all of them very difficult and all of them pregnant with dangers. He will either have to accelerate perestroika, really pushing it forward in the direction of pluralism and the free market, or he will have to engage in severe repression of the non-Russians...
...most somber note at the session was struck in assessing the state of the Soviet Union. Soviet panelist Andranik Migranyan, senior research fellow at Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, warned that after five years of perestroika, "our economists say we have yet to hit the bottom. The people are acutely aware of the gap between words and deeds by the government. We feel we might be entering a period of chaos." Already, Migranyan warned, a loose coalition of forces -- disgruntled members of labor bureaucracies, ethnic Russian nationalists and members of the Communist elite, or nomenklatura...
...Gorbachev's unprecedented attempt to democratize Communism and his drive for economic reform or perestroika have brought the Soviet Union to the brink of breakdown. As popular frustration rises, recourse to some form of more autocratic rule -- either under Gorbachev or a successor -- is increasingly possible...