Word: last
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Party conservatives who long masqueraded as yea-sayers to Gorbachev have begun to regroup. Leningrad party boss Boris Gidaspov was roundly criticized from the floor of the Congress last week for making "threats against our leader" and "sounding nostalgic notes" for the past. Surprised by the attack, Gidaspov claimed that everything going on in Leningrad was aimed at "speeding up perestroika." Gorbachev watched the whole spectacle impassively from the tribunal...
...resign. Gorbachev has played this trump card on at least two other occasions to rally support. But this time the conservative onslaught was especially fierce, particularly from Alexander Melnikov, party boss from the Siberian city of Kemerovo, one of the sites of coal-mining strikes that swept the nation last July. In an article in the liberal weekly Moscow News, journalist Danil Granin, who was a guest at the plenum, expressed alarm that "here for the first time, not at a factory meeting but from the mouths of leaders of major party committees, I heard direct accusations against Gorbachev." Granin...
...stage Five-Year Plan to improve the economy that Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov unveiled last week reflected the tug-of-war going on within the leadership. Ryzhkov made clear that his approach represented a "third alternative" to making minor corrections in central planning or plunging headlong into a free-market economy. Over the next two years, he said, the state intended to use "rigid directive measures" to reduce the national deficit from about 10% to 2.5% of GNP and increase supplies of consumer goods. A real market with varied forms of property ownership would take shape after 1992, he added, when...
...sought out the middle ground. He feints left, moves right and usually lands in the center. But such compromise policies come at a price, contributing to a widespread feeling that Gorbachev has no clear policies for the future. As Deputy Nina Dedeneva, a textile worker from Omsk, complained at last week's session, "People have ceased to believe in perestroika because the difficulties have only increased, while the period for overcoming them has become too long." Now the Kremlin has asked the people for another five years, and that could prove to be more time than Gorbachev can afford...
Preoccupied though he was with the Soviet Union's political upheaval, Andrei Sakharov found time in his last months to polish his autobiography. The following fragments from Sakharov's Memoirs, to be published in 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, tell of his evolution from an honored physicist into a man reviled, hounded and condemned to exile as the U.S.S.R.'s foremost human rights activist...