Soviet Reforms

In response to "A Step for World Safety, If East Bloc Is Serious," by Ernest Conine, Op-Ed Page, Oct. 17: Conine goes into all kinds of reasons that the Russians want to join with the United States to fight international terrorism, something at which they have no peer. However, "In view of the nationalist fervor now sweeping the Soviet Union . . . " describes the true--and sole--reason for their sudden change of heart towards terrorism. The Russians will simply tag the term "terrorist" to describe nationalist freedom fighters who want to free their once-independent countries from the Russian stranglehold.

"I squeeze the slave out of myself drop by drop." -- Anton Chekhov Tatyana A. Yegorova used to epitomize the surliness, sloth and inefficiency for which the Soviet worker was infamous. Spare parts could never seem to be retrieved from the storeroom she supervised at the Neftemash pump-manufacturing plant. According to her boss, the prevailing attitude among the workers was, "That's not my job," "Why should I work more than everyone else?" and "There's nothing I can do about it."

A factory near here that consistently failed to measure up to expectations has a new manager, elected by representatives of the workers, and he is planning sweeping changes. The turnaround came about under Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's push for economic reform and his emphasis on at least a measure of democracy in the workplace.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, known in Russia as "the architect of perestroika ," lashed out Wednesday against KGB allegations that during all the years he served in the Kremlin, he was actually working for the CIA. In a furious rejoinder carried in the liberal weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, Yakovlev skewered the former chief of the defunct KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who had accused Yakovlev, in book excerpts published last week, of being a spy for the United States. "A bigger brown-noser than V.

Defense Secretary-designate Dick Cheney said today he was skeptical about Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ability to carry out economic reforms and warned Congress against unilateral cuts in U.S. defense. "I think it's very important that we not fall into the trap of having to respond to the offer of the week," Cheney told the Senate Armed Services Committee in discussing Gorbachev's promises to unilaterally reduce Soviet military forces.

Communist Party leader Gustav Husak says that the Prague leadership has endorsed Soviet reforms and that Czechoslovakia will consider following the Kremlin's lead in some areas. Husak mentioned the possibility of electing some party leaders by secret ballot and of improving the party's methods of keeping the public informed. Husak commented on Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's efforts to carry out reforms at the Wednesday opening of a two-day session of the party Central Committee.

"Change, change, everything is changing," Lena Novikov complains, "but my life isn't changing, at least not yet and not for the better. . . . "The lines are still as long, the shop shelves are still as bare, our apartment is still as cramped and this job of mine is still as dull as it was before all this perestroika began." Novikov, 36, a low-level government administrator in Moscow, belongs to the vast majority of Soviet citizens who strongly support the goals of Mikhail S.

The Bush Administration has grown much more pessimistic in recent weeks about prospects for peaceful reform in the Soviet Union, a senior official acknowledged Wednesday. "This is the most acute that conditions have been there," the official said, citing social chaos and concerns about the law-and-order coalition forming around Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. "I don't know if this is the one that breaks it," the official said. "Fear and panic are starting to set in there. . . .

When her neighborhood bakery in southwest Moscow ran out of white bread a few days ago, Nina Zaitsev exploded with anger. "Is this what perestroika has brought us?" she shouted. "Before all these reforms, at least we had food!" The other shoppers, mostly women hurrying home from work to make supper, took up her cause, shouting abuse at the bakery staff, according to Galina Lebedev, a neighbor of Zaitsev who was present. "You could call it a bread riot, I suppose," Lebedev said later.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, leading a delegation of senior U.S. officials on a visit to Moscow, said Tuesday that the International Monetary Fund has let "bureaucratic inertia" slow efforts to reform the Soviet economy. "The pace is way too slow," Brady told reporters aboard his plane en route to the Soviet capital. At the seven-nation economic summit in July, the world's leading industrial powers offered Soviet President Mikhail S.

Foreign ministers from Europe, Canada and the United States gather here today to launch a major human rights conference in the after-glow of democracy's recent triumphs in the Soviet Union but amid growing concern about what the dizzying changes may have brought. The crumbling of authoritarian power following last month's abortive coup against President Mikhail S.

The abortive coup in the Soviet Union threw a scare into the world and U.S. economies, but its ultimate failure should bode well for them. The coup had threatened to hike world oil and grain prices, further delay repayment of the Soviet Union's $60-billion in debt--mainly to Western Europe--and dash consumer and investor confidence just as industrialized nations were struggling to climb out of--or to avoid--a recession. In the United States, which had relatively small direct investments and outstanding debt, the crisis nevertheless rocked financial markets.

Beyond arms control, the Middle East and the other familiar issues of Soviet-American summits stands a single question that will dominate the meeting here this week between George Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev: What will the United States do to help the Soviet Union move toward full democracy and establish a free-market economy? This week's summit, centered on two days of intense dialogue between the Soviet and U.S.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will try to persuade the seven major industrial nations at the economic summit in London this week that Moscow intends to "radicalize" its movement toward democracy and a free-market economy, but the speed and depth of its efforts will depend on Western aid, a key Gorbachev adviser said Sunday. Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" from London, Yevgeny M.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, preparing for a key economic meeting with Western leaders in London, sent President Bush a letter signaling that he has embraced open markets and other painful reforms for his country's crippled economy, U.S. officials said Friday. While it offered little in the way of fresh ideas or detailed prescriptions for change, the letter seemed to have reassured U.S.

About 13% of the Soviet Union's state-owned enterprises are likely to go bankrupt in the next year as the country moves from a centrally planned to a free-market economy, lawmakers were told Monday as they gave preliminary approval to the country's first bankruptcy law. Vladimir I.

Sixteen months ago the Soviet Communist Party lost its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power, for more than seven decades the arbitrary source of its legitimacy. Now the party--weakened by mass defections and internally divided, with its most conservative elements fighting desperate rear-guard actions to delay reforms--faces its most formidable challenge so far.