ABSTRACT
The accession of Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Soviet leadership has engendered a striking series of reform approaches and policy shifts that have caught the imagination of Western analysts and observers. Gorbachev seemed an unusually intelligent and energetic political manager with all the instincts of a rational technocrat. His reform initiatives encompassed a bewildering mixture of centralizing and decentralizing motifs. In the first year and a half of his tenure, Gorbachev has focused on the themes of personnel and discipline. The spectrum of initiatives deployed by him exhibits many of the characteristics of a command push from the center—certainly a vigorous, energetic, and innovative push, but one essentially intended to redirect the economy and society by political means. Dinmukhamed Kunaev's replacement as first party secretary in Kazakhstan had been aptly described as one of Gorbachev's "new puritans"—as a rational technocrat deeply devoted to the restoration of Soviet efficiency, power, and prestige.
