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None of this means that Gorbachev can be viewed as some kind of liberal, Kennedy-esque figure, despite his pledges to get the Soviet Union moving again. His patronage by two such stern figures as Suslov and Andropov would indicate an authoritarian strain in his character, even if Gorbachev's own incessant calls for "discipline" do not. In his funeral oration for Chernenko, Gorbachev put it this way: "We shall fight any manifestation of showiness and idle talk, swagger and irresponsibility, everything that contradicts the socialist norms of life." That is in line with a Russian tradition, reaching far back into Czarist times, in which "reform" calls for suppressing rather than tolerating opposition.
The most visible, and stunning, initial reform has been the crackdown on drinking. By Soviet official standards, Gorbachev is personally abstemious; he takes no more than one or two glasses of wine at diplomatic receptions and the like. He has valid reasons far beyond personal taste, however, to enforce similar restraint on his fellow citizens. Alcoholism has been so rampant among them that it has been widely blamed for the fact that in the Soviet Union, alone among industrial nations, life expectancy for males has actually dropped in recent years: it is 62 (U.S. male life expectancy is 71).
The extent of the crackdown has startled everyone, including government officials. Gorbachev has raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, reduced the number of liquor stores in operation, forced the remaining ones to open three hours later each day, and restricted production sharply. Alcohol may not be served in restaurants until 2 p.m., an hour so late that many establishments refuse to serve it at all. Soviet officials take the new edict very seriously; they prefer not to have their pictures taken holding a glass. The government is jacking up prices steeply. The price of vodka last week leaped 25%, to the ruble equivalent of about $6.80 a pint, a princely sum in a country where wages average around $300 a month.
The antialcohol crusade is just one early example of the rigorous approach Gorbachev intends to adopt to promote efficiency, self-discipline and pride in the Soviet system throughout the society. There are sure to be many other manifestations of his desire to carry out major changes. As he put it in his interview with TIME, "Everyone has got to restructure things, restyle his whole way of working and thinking."
But can Gorbachev overcome the very strong forces of inertia? Says Robert Legvold, associate director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union: "You cannot just walk in and change a relatively sclerotic system like the Soviet Union." Gorbachev's public pronouncements about economic reform have not gone much beyond the endlessly repeated stress on less goldbricking and harder work on the part of everyone from government ministers to factory hands and collective farmers. There is some talk of extending experiments in which the state agrees to buy a certain quantity of produce from farmers and permits them to keep and sell privately any additional food they can grow. The Soviet Union boasts world-class technology in weapons and military equipment, but technology in the civilian economy lags badly behind Western standards.