Word: sovietologists
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...repeated urgings to take the position of Executive President until he concluded that it was what the country needed. Because -- or in spite -- of his year as an exchange student at Columbia University in 1959, Yakovlev dislikes and distrusts the U.S. and considers it dominated by right-wing thinking. Sovietologist Dimitri Simes says he is "unusually intellectually curious, a person with imagination, with vision...
...Russian history, and Gromov denies rumors that he is contemplating a coup, but he says the army "cannot be kept outside politics." His political views are unknown, but he is a conservative on military matters who nevertheless acknowledges that change is inevitable. If the government flounders and chaos threatens, Sovietologist Simes says Gromov "would be the man to watch...
Alexander Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev's closest Kremlin aides, worked on a dissertation about F.D.R. while an exchange student at Columbia University in 1958. "What struck Yakovlev most about Roosevelt," says Loren Graham, a Sovietologist who was a classmate at Columbia, "was how Roosevelt understood that to save the system he had to give up much that wasn't central in order to preserve the essence." The lifting of the Iron Curtain shows that Yakovlev wasn't the only one who understood that point...
...second scenario of Soviet catastrophe is a coup from the Soviet "right" engineered by the army, perhaps in conjunction with the KGB. Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia...
...more efficient state monopoly. At last week's meeting, Gorbachev dismissed all claims "that we are unable to resolve problems facing the country without introducing capitalism into the economy." So far, though, perestroika has been a series of slogans rather than a well-structured set of programs. American Sovietologist Abraham Becker of the Rand Corp. concludes that Gorbachev came to power with a narrow view of the country's problem and what was needed to reform it. "He believed erroneously that drastic but elementary personnel changes, a shaking up of the cadres, would turn around the bureaucracy," says Becker...