In one way or another the principal controversies reviewed thus far illustrate an obvious process of "escalation" that characterized Soviet public discourse on economic and political issues in the late 1980s. Whether the issue was workplace democratization, the legitimacy of political pluralism and a reassessment of "bourgeois" democracy, or appropriate grounds for inequalities in economic status, we may observe a growing readiness to transcend not only the views that prevailed in the pre-Gorbachev period but also those that represented the initial versions of the reformist position. By and large, however, the discussions that have concerned us up to this point were conducted within a "socialist" orientation and did not directly challenge the official Soviet version of Marxist-Leninist ideology. But while they did not explicitly call for the abandonment of this ideology, these discussions certainly helped prepare the groundwork for the direct ideological challenges that emerged at the end of the decade.