ABSTRACT
In Moscow, by contrast, Gorbachev's rule-consolidated within a purged Politburo-decisively broke the pattern of uncommunicative, inflexible, and almost inert leadership that had become the Kremlin norm since the later Brezhnev years. As soon as the administration's budget request for fiscal year 1987 was presented to Congress at the beginning of the year, it became virtually certain that the key demands, for deficit reduction coupled to a substantial increase in defense authorizations, would be substantially rejected. In the end, $291.8 billion was authorized, an 8.9 percent reduction, as compared to 6.1 percent for fiscal year 1986, 5.2 percent for fiscal 1985, and 4.2 percent for 1984. Even those defeats, however, understate the gap between perceptions and substance that the year-end troubles merely reduced. The onset of this condition antedated by many years the Reagan administration, but its positive encouragement of complacency has certainly done nothing to improve the situation.
