Word: plenum
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Gorbachev cleared a major hurdle at last month's Central Committee plenum, when he won backing for a far-reaching new law on state enterprises. The measure is intended to loosen the stranglehold of the central planning bureaucracy by giving greater independence to factory and farm managers. Among other provisions, it will require that local managers be elected by their workers and that the country's 48,000 state enterprises fund new and continuing operations from their own profits. Before the law takes effect next January, it must be accompanied by a package of enabling legislation dealing with such things...
Gorbachev had in fact prepared eleven draft decrees along those lines, but chose not to put them to a vote at the plenum. Some Western analysts took this as a sign that he had yet to overcome resistance from conservatives among the Central Committee's 307 members, 60% of whom are holdovers from the Brezhnev era. Gorbachev is widely expected to seek a purge of such foot draggers at a national party conference that he has scheduled for June 1988. Nonetheless, the plenum left little doubt about his political strength, which was underscored by the naming of three...
Gorbachev had demonstrated his clout four weeks before the plenum by taking swift action against the military in the wake of West German Pilot Mathias Rust's spectacular landing just outside Red Square. When the Hamburg teenager's single-engine Cessna penetrated some 400 miles of Soviet airspace with impunity, Gorbachev immediately sacked Defense Minister Sergei Sokolov and Air Defense Chief Alexander Koldunov. In addition to giving the country an object lesson in the personal accountability of those in power -- and demonstrating the military's subservience to the political leadership -- Gorbachev seized the occasion to place a reform-minded ally...
...past month, and especially in the wake of the Central Committee session, Gorbachev has moved decisively in the direction of what he calls radical reform. Before the plenum, some Western analysts suspected that perestroika was largely a rhetorical exercise backed by a set of diluted half- measures. But Gorbachev's latest proposals, along with recent declarations by some of his key economic advisers, point to more far-reaching structural changes. Economist Abel Aganbegyan, for example, has advocated letting prices rise to market levels. At present, government subsidies on such items as food, clothing and shelter run to $114 billion...
...conspirator, then your President will not be worth a kopek." While the Soviets may be relishing the Iran-contra crisis, their interest is more strategic than voyeuristic. Reagan's current predicament, combined with Mikhail Gorbachev's success at consolidating his own power in the Politburo at his party plenum last month, has convinced many in Moscow that Reagan now needs a summit far more than Gorbachev. As a result, a wide spectrum of high-ranking Soviet officials are hinting that they may pounce on the opportunity to seek further U.S. arms- control concessions -- notably on Star Wars -- before setting...