Word: said
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to Migranyan, the unsettling change in climate is partly due to Gorbachev's democratizing efforts. Those measures have permitted grass-roots resistance to unpopular reforms. "The Soviet Union," said Migranyan, "is acting like a democracy without really being one." Above all, said Migranyan, his country needed a model to make the transition from state-owned to free- market economy. "Nobody knows how to do it," he said, including Gorbachev, whose government lacks "conceptual ideas and clarity about what to do." Migranyan said the short-term remedy was either food or force. As long as there was sausage...
...outcomes were possible, Migranyan suggested: Gorbachev might become more authoritarian, "crushing all obstacles and imposing economic reforms," or a conservative regime might emerge that would jettison him along with his political and social reforms, even while seeking to modernize the economy. With Gorbachev's room for maneuver shrinking, Migranyan said, "maybe we need an authoritarian period of development . . . if democracy prevents market mechanisms from developing...
...free markets," a process he called "perestroika without glasnost." But Grunwald doubted even that would have the desired result. He pointed out that while some Asian economies -- Taiwan's and South Korea's, for example -- flourished under authoritarian regimes, much of Latin America's had not. Said he: "There must be a degree of democracy and freedom for people to do their best, to take chances...
Compared with his Soviet colleague, Geza Jeszenszky, spokesman for Hungary's Democratic Forum and dean of the School of Social and Political Science at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, was optimistic. Said he: "In Central Europe we have a better chance for controlled change...
Admitting that it was relatively easy to change the constitution and restore democracy in a small country like Hungary, Jeszenszky said the economic challenge faced by East European nations was formidable but not impossible. "Miracles cannot be expected," he warned, with specific reference to Poland. Nonetheless, he urged the creation of "small islands of prosperity" in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe that would be attractive examples and inspire imitation. "A few years ago, people in Hungary were pessimistic," he said. "They thought reforms brought only inflation and trouble. But now, and in East Germany and Czechoslovakia as well...