Word: mikhail
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...routine: sipping coffee, logging on the computer or perhaps watering a plant. TIME's Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott and Nation Editor Walter Isaacson talk to each other on the telephone. One such conversation several months ago strayed beyond the standard morning fare of news topics. Discussing Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy initiatives, Talbott and Isaacson were suddenly struck by a tantalizing question: What effect will all this have on the cold war? Associate Editor Thomas Sancton, meanwhile, was grappling with another puzzle, this one posed by Gorbachev's dramatic domestic reforms: Was the face of Communism changing...
...waiters, are investing in a business that will prosper -- or fail -- without government interference. "We never imagined we would do this well," says the energetic, chain-smoking co- chairman. Cafe 36 Kropotkinskaya, as they named the restaurant (bureaucrats wanted it to be called Cafe Cooperator), is a consequence of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms legalizing small-scale private enterprise. One of the goals is to improve the country's service sector, and nowhere is improvement needed more than in Soviet restaurants, which are notorious for rude service and poor food...
...Mikhail Gorbachev's calls for glasnost (openness),* demokratizatsiya (democratization) and perestroika (restructuring) have become the watchwords of a bold attempt to modernize his country's creaky economic machinery and revitalize a society stultified by 70 years of totalitarian rule. In televised addresses, speeches to the party faithful and flesh- pressing public appearances -- often with his handsome wife Raisa -- he has spread his gospel of modernization. Translating his words into action, he is streamlining the government bureaucracy, reshuffling the military, moving reform-minded allies into the party leadership and allowing multicandidate elections at the local level. He has loosened restrictions...
Meanwhile, what is by Soviet standards a spectacular thaw has got under way in the cultural domain. During the past year more than a dozen previously banned movies have been screened before fascinated audiences. On the stage, plays like Mikhail Shatrov's Dictatorship of Conscience examine past failures of Communism. Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a novel that chronicles the murderous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, appeared in a literary journal after going unpublished for two decades. Last month a group of ex-political prisoners and dissident writers applied for permission to publish their own magazine, aptly titled...
...know he was going to be that different. Last week he marked only his 28th month on the job, yet already his name is being used to describe a new era. That may be premature, but it conveys the sense among citizens and observers of the Soviet Union that Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, 56, is more than just the supreme leader of a vast, heavily armed country: he also represents the potential for dramatic change...