It is an attempt at moral regeneration, at expiation, at the purging of guilt;
a would-be effort at performing a Wirtschaftswunder (so far without visible success);
a political reorganization, the establishment of democracy, from above;
an intellectual liberalization; a partial abandonment of pretensions at a monopoly of truth;
the withering away, or at least conspicuous routinization of a secular faith;
a reincorporation of the Soviet Union in a wider civilization, an international idiom;
a recovery of traditional Russian culture (and of others), including ‘spiritual’ values, a much used phrase;
the establishment of the rule of law;
the re-creation of civil society;
a re-orientation in foreign relations and policy.

The legitimacy and the appeal of the perestroika regime has a curious double basis. It says, in effect: we claim your support because we are changing everything; and we also claim your support because we are preserving our established order, our Soviet, revolutionary, Leninist heritage and tradition. This may or may not be contradictory; but it is unquestionably the case and this is the manner in which the great restructuring is presented, advocated and defended.

A Major Obstacle to Grasping The Real Problems of perestroika is the underestimation of its contents and of the ensuing constellation of the social forces involved. Usually, perestroika is seen merely as a struggle between the advocates of democratization and sweeping economic reforms on the one hand, and the conservatives, who are deliberately or otherwise seeking to preserve the bureaucratic management practices which have emerged in the country over the last fifty years. All in all, such a characterization does correctly reflect the overall historical perspective. If the administrative system is not drastically restructured within a few decades, the country will suffer economic and political disaster. But when considering, say, the next five to ten years, things are rather more complex. In such a time-span very diverse scenarios are possible.

In The Spring of 1989, as Poland's Communist Party was hammering out a new political deal with the non-communist opposition, one Communist official was heard to remark to a Solidarity participant that the only thing really dividing the two sides was the agricultural question: who buries whom? Ironically, neither the Communist Party nor Solidarity could have imagined that within a matter of months Poland would have its first noncommunist prime minister in over forty years, and that the Communist Party would find itself fighting for its political survival, pleading for more posts in a new Solidarity-led Cabinet.

‘When I Was Organizing Underground Activities against the Nationalist Party in the 1940s to call for democracy and to attack corruption, I could never have dreamed that forty years later, I would have to demonstrate again for the same causes against my own party.’ Such a comment from a long-term party activist shows how deep the support for the fledgling democratic movement in China went. The massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens on the night of 3 – 4 June 1989 brought into sharp relief just how out of touch China's top leaders had become with the processes of change which their own reform programmes had set in motion. Many long-term supporters of the party had finally lost faith in the revolution that was being carried out in their name. At the time of writing (July 1989) that goes a long way towards explaining why the old men who now rule Beijing decided to use such crude measures to suppress their own population and China's future leaders.

The Evangelical Church Faced Harassment and hostility from the state in the immediate aftermath of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1949. Indeed, the struggle in which the Evangelical Church is today engaged can be seen as both a consequence and continuation of a struggle which began in 1949. The Soviet Union had gained control in 1945 of that part of Germany which was most staunchly Protestant. Initially there was no central authority for the Evangelical churches in postwar Germany. Instead there were a number of regional churches, eight of which were located in the Soviet Zone. However, in 1948 the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) was created as an umbrella organization for the whole country. Indeed the EKD remained intact as an all-German organization until 1969, despite the estrangement and mutual hostility which characterized inter-German relations until that year.

The People of Czechoslovakia Have Now Risen and are determined — as are the people of other socialist countries — to overthrow the hated party leadership. People like Husak, Jakes, Indra, Fojtik, Hofman and others, came to power with the help of Soviet tanks and have been able to maintain themselves at the top until just recently. Only by means of repressions in the style of Brezhnev have they been able to hold on to power for twenty years. They have built up a system of spying and terror which enabled them to uncover and suppress any development of the opposition in the country. They have systematically distorted the facts of the Prague spring and the erstwhile reform movement with lies and unproven assertions.

The Return to Democracy of Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the 1970s is an encouraging and inspiring example to democrats everywhere — but especially to Latin American demccrats because of their region's close historical and cultural ties with two of the Southern European countries. However, apart from the general feeling of optimism that the Southern European experience legitimately engenders, are there any specific lessons and lessons specifically relevant to Latin America that can be learned from it? In this article, I shall suggest six such lessons. Some of these are positive lessons — examples to be followed, such as choosing a form of democracy that is suitable to a country's size and to its political and social divisions; others are negative ' examples to be avoided, such as Portugal's and Greece's experimentation with a presidential form of government. Some lessons are based on common characteristics of the new Southern European democracies; others concern traits on which they differ.

On 14 May, 1989, Argentinians Elected The Peronist Carlos Menem as president, causing the first constitutional transfer of power to the opposition since 1916. The situation is so unfamiliar that quite a few Peronists are behaving in their newly acquired positions, particularly in some cultural and mass communication spheres, as though the change had been the result of a violent takeover. After all, the first Peronism was heralded by the nationalist military coup of 1943, and its second coming, in 1973, was the result of a combined strategy of electioneering and guerrilla tactics. Those were the days when many Peronists repeated Mao Tse-tung's dictum that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’, and such intellectual habits die hard. Culturally the authoritarian components are still strong in Peronism, partly because most of the progressive, liberal or left-of-centre intelligentsia have flocked to the Radicales or to small leftist parties, renouncing their sympathies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they thought Peronism was the harbinger of revolution, owing to its working-class composition. This, of course, creates a cultural vacuum in Peronism, which has to be filled by whoever comes or remains from the old days. However, many things have changed in the Argentine political climate, and despite the many stragglers the country is becoming accustomed to a pluralist institutional structure.

In August 1989 a Declaration of War On The State by Colombian drug traffickers and the attendant murder of a leading presidential candidate, Liberal Luis Carlos Galgn, seemed to threaten the foundations of democracy itself. Yet as the campaign leading up to the 1990 elections went forward under conditions of extraordinarily tight security, it also appeared that Colombia's two traditional parties would enter the next decade paradoxically still secure in the virtually monopolistic position within the domain of electoral politics that they had held for more than a century.

Pasok's Eight Year-Old Socialist Administration, The first in Greek history, which followed its successive victories in 1981 and 1985, was due to undergo its third electoral test in mid-1989. In fact, the electoral campaign had started in the late summer of 1988 and was well under way at the beginning of the new year. Andreas Papandreou's charismatic leadership of PASOK, which in the past had been the principal explanation of his firm control of events, was already starting to fade, as he struggled to put a brave face on the resignations of respected ministers and party members in the wake of revelations of several scandals at the top of the pyramid. Foremost among these was the celebrated case of George Koskotas, the young owner of the Bank of Crete, who was in gaol in America after his escape from Greece, to avoid charges of embezzling more than £130 million in bank deposits. In mid-March, Time magazine's cover story showing Koskotas behind bars was entitled: ‘The Looting of Greece: a fallen tycoon charges Papandreou with stealing millions’. This caused the resignation of Agamemnon Koutsoyorgas, Papandreou's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, when Koskotas claimed he had credited him with $2 million in a Swiss bank account. He also stated that Papandreou had authorized this payment and had himself been on the payroll.