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Russian is a language spoken with the hands, the eyebrows, an occasional shake of the head from side to side or a shrug of the shoulders. Gorbachev has mastered those gestures, and more. He may slice the air with a modified karate chop or spin his hands one over the other like a pinwheel, then extend them palms up in a gesture of vulnerability, only to clench them into fists a moment later. All the time his intense eyes lock onto a listener's. The eyes, he once told an audience in Prague, never lie. Much of his animation comes through even in translation. In a TV interview, for example, he may pause reflectively after a question, start an answer with a few slow phrases, then burst into a torrent of words that an interpreter can barely keep up with.
Such skills have served Gorbachev well in his 33 months in office. Though he grumbles about opposition to his policies from a bureaucracy that "does not want change and does not want to lose some rights associated with privileges," he has consolidated his power rapidly. He has thoroughly purged the ranks of the Politburo, the Central Committee and government ministries of leaders judged to be incompetent or dragging their feet on reform. More than half of all government ministers and 44% of party Central Committee members have been replaced since he took over.
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost stops well short of Western-style artistic and journalistic freedom. Nonetheless, the policy has gone further than anyone would have predicted even a few years ago, winning Gorbachev the enthusiastic approval of intellectuals. Says Vitali Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, an illustrated weekly that has published hard-hitting articles about social problems as well as anthologies of long-suppressed poetry: "This is an evening of dancing in a society that has never danced."
Perestroika, however, is still more platitude than policy. Gorbachev confessed in June that "despite tremendous efforts, the restructuring drive has in actual fact not reached many localities." In particular, agricultural reforms designed to give farmers more incentive, which Gorbachev began experimenting with back in Stavropol and for which he supposedly won Politburo approval as long ago as 1983, have yet to be put into effect nationwide. Meanwhile, the economy continues to fall behind those of the West. As recently as 1975, the Soviet economy was about 58% as large as its U.S. counterpart. But by 1984 that figure had fallen to 54%, and the gap is probably still growing. With his usual hard-boiled realism, Gorbachev told the Central Committee shortly before becoming General Secretary, "We cannot remain a major power in world affairs unless we put our domestic house in order."