Title: Dropping the Pilot: Gorbachev Retires Gromyko
Abstract: By spring 1988 Gorbachev was using the word 'democracy' routinely, almost casually — democracy, the quality that would alone, in his view, give genuine substance to perestroika. Gorbachev unequivocally called his reforms a 'revolution', and himself a revolutionary. And the Soviet press seemed to receive the news without alarm, treating it as another slogan in the ongoing campaign, what the French press sometimes called a 'parachutage des mots d'ordres'. At the time, I could not understand the extraordinary equanimity. I was in the habit of thinking of the Soviet system as fundamentally a system of Stalinism, one which had, to be sure, undergone a far-reaching process of rationalization in the successive post-Stalin regimes, but one which nevertheless remained a grinding dictatorship. It was capable of many things: broad and open-ended detente with the West, increased press freedom, inner-party discussion about party history, far-reaching reassessments in culture and media policy, every kind of economic reform, including the development of a consumer goods and light industry sector governed according to market principles. But not democracy. Not, that is, if the term were meant literally. That was the main rub in analyzing the matter from western perspectives. Soviet propaganda had long maintained that the system was the most democratic in the world. This was not entirely cynical.KeywordsForeign PolicyCommunist PartyCentral CommitteeFrench RevolutionClass StruggleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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