Word: sovietizers
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...four years, the Kremlin finally chose a chief, Mikhail Gorbachev, who at 54 is young enough to give the U.S.S.R. vigorous leadership for the rest of the century. Gorbachev moved quickly to consolidate his power, firing old-line bureaucrats by the score and wooing popular support by touring Soviet farms and factories in the manner of a handshaking, baby-kissing Western politician. He broke the long, frozen silence between the nuclear superpowers by agreeing to meet President Ronald Reagan in Geneva for the first Soviet-American summit in six years. Their November talks in front of a cozy fire moved...
...these turbulent and momentous events and phenomena, however, only the ascension of Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership could eventually rival for long-range importance to the world the sweeping changes Deng is pushing through in China. But for all the panache he displayed on taking power and all the headlines and television time he and Reagan commanded at the summit, Gorbachev's impact on history by year's end was still far more potential than actual. The freshness and vigor of his personal style far outweighed the importance of any changes he had made in Soviet foreign or domestic policy...
Gorbachev, Deng and the heads of almost every Marxist country face the same fundamental problem. In a 1984 interview with the Italian Communist daily L'Unità, Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, phrased it this way: "Since the October Revolution [of 1917, which enthroned Soviet Marxism], more than 60 years have passed. How is it that many socialist countries have not been able to overtake capitalist ones in terms of development? What was it that did not work...
...longer seriously disputed, even by many Marxist experts. Before Deng, the failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace of the 1960s, and its citizens still have...
Gorbachev has been unsparing in his criticisms of Soviet economic performance. "You squander countless resources in every industry," he told party workers in Leningrad last May. But so far he has been unwilling to modify in any essential way the system of centralized state control of every aspect of economic life fashioned by Joseph Stalin; he has been trying only to make it work better. While promising to "restructure" the economy, Gorbachev pointedly avoids using the word reform, apparently because it implies a more drastic change than any he is ready to contemplate...