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At best, it will take years before Gorbachev's program of freeing industry from Moscow's stifling central control results in any significant increase in the quantity and quality of goods reaching Soviet consumers. Gorbachev complains that "Soviet rockets can find Halley's comet and fly to Venus with amazing accuracy, but . . . many household appliances are of poor quality." The Soviet leader may be hard put to maintain the popular support he is counting on to overcome bureaucratic lethargy and opposition. Gauging public opinion in the U.S.S.R. is a highly uncertain art, but letters to the Soviet press often approve the idea of perestroika while simultaneously complaining that the writers have not seen much of it yet. Some polls disclose considerable grumbling that perestroika has so far meant only harder work for little measurable reward. Consumers may soon have to pay more for some of the necessities of life if Gorbachev follows through on his plan to trim or eliminate many state subsidies. The Kremlin boss rightly complains that the subsidies on bread, for example, make it so cheap that children sometimes use loaves as footballs. But a higher price for bread, while it might be fully justified by production costs, is likely to cause strong discontent.
Gorbachev acknowledges that his antialcohol campaign is highly unpopular. He once told a group of writers that he was aware of "threats" as well as grumbling from the long lines of people queueing up to buy scarce and expensive vodka. One gag has a man at the end of one of the liquor-store lines announcing that he is so furious he is going over to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev. He returns in a few minutes, however, and resumes his place in the queue. "Well, did you do it?" asks a comrade. "You must be joking," the would-be assassin replies. "The line over there is even longer."
) In foreign policy too, Gorbachev's approach is a mixture of much touted "new thinking" and dismayingly old reflexes. Despite his flexibility in the realm of superpower relations, he maintains some strange attitudes about the U.S. By his own account, he began reading American history as a law student, and he has kept himself remarkably well informed. In recent interviews he has referred offhandedly to matters, such as Ronald Reagan's "economic bill of rights," that are not widely known even to U.S. citizens.
Nonetheless, he seems to have a streak of what can only be described as anti-Americanism. Perhaps the first American to have an extended conversation with him was John Chrystal, chairman of Bankers Trust of Des Moines and a frequent traveler to the Soviet Union, who called on Gorbachev in 1981. Says Chrystal: "He does believe, never having been here, that the U.S. has abject poverty and quite a lot of it. My impression is that he thinks there are whole towns that are just sort of destitute." Eugene Whelan, the former Canadian Agriculture Minister who was later Gorbachev's host in North America, also visited him in 1981 and got into an argument about armaments. Says Whelan: "He was going on about how the U.S. was the aggressor, how it was making weapons. He said the U.S. was returning to the conditions of the 1950s." When Whelan remonstrated that in the American view it was the Soviet Union that had piled up weapons far beyond any legitimate defense needs, Gorbachev brusquely responded, "That is erroneous."