Soviet Union

Boris Yeltsin has now given his emphatic answer to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's recent emotional plea for national unity in the face of rising separatist movements and deepening economic adversity. The response from the president of the vast Russian Republic was to declare open political war on Gorbachev, and on the central rule of the renascent and increasingly hard-line Communist Party. Gorbachev, Yeltsin demanded, must go.

It is interesting to note the difference in the way the media in Russia and that in the U.S.A. reported the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The Soviets have such a fear of ever admitting that an accident could occur in their "perfect" society that they try and hide the facts from their people and the rest of the world. In the United States the competition for media sales results in greatly exaggerated stories designed to catch the public's attention. In both countries the public is ill served since factual information is never presented.

Seems that the leader of the democratic world, our President Bush, is determined to sustain Gorbachev and his totalitarian state. Instead of being a beacon for freedom and democracy, he supports an oppressive regime. The excuse seems to be: It's simply easier to deal with the few than the many. Gorbachev, a dictator in his death throes, toots his disinformation horn, which curiously finds credibility in the West. He predicts internal chaos and extreme danger to the rest of the world if his prison state ever falls apart.

Norman Davies, as a history professor, does nothing to help us in "Understanding Russia," but he does enhance "Our Perilous Ignorance." He obviously belongs to that "army of Western Sovietologists and Slavicists" who nowadays are clearly divided between those who don't know how the Soviet world works and those who can't explain it. He claims that Moscow's "attitudes are archetypally right wing and ultraconservative." By such a twisted definition, our President becomes a Communist. The professor indirectly but definitely implies that communism includes "a glorification of war."

Olga Lepeshinskaya, the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina for three decades during the Soviet times, has died. She was 92. Nataliya Uvarova, a spokeswoman for Russia's Culture Ministry, said Lepeshinskaya died Saturday of an unspecified illness. The Itar-Tass news agency reported that Lepeshinskaya died in her sleep at her Moscow apartment. Lepeshinskaya was born to a noble family in Kiev in 1916. When she first tried to enter the Bolshoi choreographic school, she was rejected.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev calls it perestroika. It translates literally to "restructuring," but the word is too thin, doesn't give the dimension the Soviets have in mind. Perestroika, they say, means change from the foundations up--walls, wiring, floor plan, plumbing, everything. Gorbachev is pushing perestroika night after night on Soviet television, in speeches to educational groups, at factories, in Riga, in Moscow, around the countryside.

General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev has launched an extraordinary new policy direction that, in time, may transform the fabric of Soviet society in both its domestic and international characteristics. It is already clear that Gorbachev has rejected the legacy of Josef Stalin perpetuated, though with less tyranny, by Leonid I. Brezhnev. Most U.S. observers now agree that Gorbachev's "new thinking" is a genuine break with the past. It is not an exercise in propaganda.