ABSTRACT
The year's claim to historic importance comes from Mikhail Gorbachev's election in March as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At the time, the largely expected ascendancy of a run-of-the mill bureaucrat was hardly a world-shaking event. The Politburo oldsters must have had mixed feelings about handing over the leadership to Gorbachev, at fifty-three, a mere youth by their standards. In nominating him before the Central Committee, the foreign minister Gromyko, himself seventy-six, appeared to grope for justification: "Mikhail Gorbachev knows how to find solutions that fit the general policy of the Party". What a bad prophesy! It was more difficult to project probable changes on the domestic front. Gorbachev should have been impressed by the economic progress of China, its Communist leaders having abandoned the economic shibboleths of Marxism-Leninism. Gorbachev would not try to bully Reagan as Khrushchev had Kennedy in Vienna in 1962.
