Perestroika Lost

A truly moving piece in the New York Times by Mikhail Gorbachev, written for the anniversary of the Perestroika. Gorbachev is a widely hated personality in Russia and he seems to be fully aware of this, the article is overloaded with remarks of self-defense. At the same time, he boldly comments on how badly Russia needs a functional civil society in order to modernize its economy and reach a higher level of development. Pity he's a lone voice, and also pity that most probably this act will turn out counter productive as well, for not only did he, "the failed modernizer" dare criticize the course of politics in his country, but he also did so in the New York Times. (Which one of my teachers referred to as  a "tabloid" recently.)

There's only one point I didn't quite agree with: he says the biggest mistake they made during Perestroika is that they failed to modernize the communist party in time. In my opinion the biggest mistake was that they didn't follow the Word Bank's recommendations but liberalized prices rather than introducing and executing privatization first. This way they created a situation of complete deficit in products and skyrocketing inflation.  They should have created a clear and workable structure for the economy, and only then introduce new measures.
This is partly why the legacy of the transition has turned out as it has, because people remember only the chaos and the empty shelves, not much more. I've heard it a thousand times - during the communist era they had seen shortage in most products, but nothing quite similar to what they experienced under Gorbachev. The Russian public lost faith in Gorbachev the very first moment, which provides a powerful argument for defendants of the present regime until this day.