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Quite aside from the cut of his clothes or his jib, Gorbachev indisputably differs from the Old Guard in his ability to talk to Westerners without giving shrill lectures on the advantages of the Soviet way. He has made eleven trips abroad, six of them to Western countries, and demonstrated to farmers in Canada, politicians in Britain, and NATO diplomats that he is a good listener and that he can discuss issues briskly and without putting them into an ideological context. In talks with British officials in London last year, for example, he argued against the development of Star Wars weaponry, saying that it would divert funds badly needed to modernize the Soviet economy. Also in Britain he told a group of business executives, "If we can get the economics right, I believe politics and peace will look after themselves." Whether new ways of speaking necessarily mean new ways of thinking is, of course, another matter. Argued a State Department official last week: "I think we will see a lot of old wine in new bottles."
Gorbachev provided the clearest outline of his agenda in his 30-minute acceptance speech to the Central Committee the day he took office. He offered no strikingly new programs or proposals. His emphasis was on continuity. Said Gorbachev: "The strategic line, worked out at the 26th Party Congress (and) at the subsequent plenary meetings of the Central Committee with the vigorous participation of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov and Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, has been and remains unchanged."
In evoking the name of Andropov, who is widely believed to have been responsible for Gorbachev's rapid rise through the hierarchy, the General Secretary signaled his intention to pursue the cautious program of bureaucratic and economic reform that has been desultorily followed for the past two years. The Soviet Union, Gorbachev said, had to make a "decisive turn" and switch the economy to the "tracks of intensive development." Hinting at the widening technological gap between the West and the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev asked his countrymen to push for scientific and technical excellence by applying socialist economic principles "in a creative way." Even within a planned economy, he said, there was room for "enhancing the independence of enterprises (and) raising their interest in the end product of their work." But Gorbachev also cautioned against letting the drive for greater material benefits disrupt "social justice," a signal that the Soviet Union, for all its economic difficulties, was not about to adopt the sort of incentive systems being introduced and practiced these days in Deng Xiaoping's China.