Word: perestroikas
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...widely anticipated campus appearance—his first in a decade—former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev looked back yesterday on the era of perestroika that he had engineered...
Gorby. Glasnost. Perestroika. Those quaint, inseparable terms entered the global lexicon in the 1980s as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed a new glasnost (openness) in Soviet society and began implementing perestroika (restructuring) in its economy and politics. He sought a more conciliatory relationship with the U.S., negotiating arms reductions. With a Western-style politician's charm and homey touch, he became, as TIME put it, "a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union: more open, more concerned with the welfare of its citizens and less with the spread of its ideology and system abroad." What did spread...
...putsch had been a total surprise, although it should not have been. By 1990, Gorbachev's perestroika was more uncomfortable balancing act than dynamic reform program. He often seemed overwhelmed at the complexity of the task he had taken on. Reform had been premised on the assumption that dismantling the repressive apparatus of the state, admitting to the horrors of the past and trying to rectify them would strengthen the legitimacy of Gorbachev and his brand of modernized socialism. It did the opposite. The masses turned against the system and Gorbachev himself, whom they labeled a "boltun," a wind...
...mood in the Gorbachev camp after Vilnius was bleak. Some wanted to leave him. Others stayed on, trying, as one put it, "to glue back together whatever we can" of perestroika. Life took on a faintly unreal quality. Between then and August, I saw a lot of one man who was, in the official hierarchy, among the top four or five leaders of the Soviet Union. (In fact his powers were more modest, though his access to information was extremely wide). We would sit in his massive office at the Kremlin, often for a couple of hours at a time...
...cannot occur in the absence of a profit motive. And given the experience of socialism, it's a fair challenge. The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe was in the final analysis a product of its stagnation. The absence of a market mechanism, Mikhail Gorbachev argued in his book "Perestroika," meant that planned economies were fundamentally lacking an engine for economic innovation, and were therefore doomed to stagnation...