Word: socialists
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Contradiction has also become the essence of its second revolution, the radical crusade by Mikhail Gorbachev to create nothing less than a new Soviet Union. In fits and starts, using such hybrids as socialist markets and one- party pluralism, he has directed one of the most transfixing spectacles of modern times: an encrusted political and economic system being brought, stumbling and blinking in amazement, into the light of a new era. In the tradition of Peter the Great, who opened up Russia to the West almost 300 years ago to rescue it from backwardness, Gorbachev is trying to transform, neither...
Gorbachev's economic reforms, while radical, are nonetheless carefully circumscribed. He is not marching headlong to capitalism but is attempting to reinvent Marxism by creating socialist markets, socialist competition and cooperative ventures. Private ownership of the means of production (land, factories) is still prohibited. Individuals cannot hire workers with a view to profiting from their labor but rather must form cooperative arrangements. There is a noncompetitive banking system, and no stock market for financing private ventures. Most important of all, there is no rational price system: thousands of prices are still set by state fiat rather than supply and demand...
...market incentives to work, prices will have to be decontrolled -- a frightening prospect given the pent-up inflationary pressures. Rents and the prices of meat, bread and milk have been kept at the same level for decades; if decontrolled, they would be likely to rocket. Gorbachev understands the challenge. "Socialist markets cannot be formed without price reform," he told a party meeting in February. But having reached that daunting precipice, he blinked. Rents and basic food prices, he promised, will not be raised for at least two years. Until there are price reform and quality products to market, the ruble...
...latitude to misuse psychiatry. Under the old rules, "mentally ill" people could be forcibly hospitalized if they were judged to pose a physical threat to themselves or society. That remains unchanged, according to Podrabinek, but now people can also be put away if they threaten "the rules of the socialist community...
...have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill the criteria of partinost (party spirit), ideinost (firm commitment to prescribed ideology) and narodnost (true portrayal of the life, soul and spirit of the people...