Gorbachev's command performance
Richard Swift measures how far glasnost and perestroika have come and looks down the thorny path ahead.

What about the workers?
Alex Amerisov goes home to take the pulse of Soviet workers and finds their blood pressure is dangerously high.

Balancing act
Mikhail Gorbachev will need all his skill to keep from dropping any of a dangerously heavy load of problems.

Red desert
Short-sighted bureaucrats are despoiling the legendary Russian wilderness. But Francheska Chalidze reports that the Soviet people have had about enough.

Friend to the colonel
John Sorenson exposes Soviet arms deals in the Horn of Africa.

Prison of nations
Nationalism is on the rise in the USSR Ronald Suny wonders if glasnost is big enough to contain it.

THE USSR - THE FACTS

Silent sisters
Beauty contests in Moscow! Linda Feldmann thinks that Soviet women have a long way to go.

The battle of the minds
Old taboos are collapsing and the pages of Pravda contain articles that would once bring the police calling. K S Karol looks at idol-breaking in the USSR.

SIMPLY. modern Soviet history

Bitter legacy
Arrogant bureaucrats have always ruled Russia - Steven White goes back into the mists of Tsarism to find the roots of dictatorship.

You often start a journey long before you board the plane. This is particularly true of my trip to the Soviet Union. I feel like I've been shadow boxing with the Soviet Union ever since I started to have an interest in politics. My ideas about the place come from reading and a lot of late night arguments in smokey bars. I've travelled a fair bit in the Third World but I first approached going to the USSR with more than my usual share of apprehension. That great hulking shape on the eastern end of the map, or across the North Pole if you live as I do in Canada, has always seemed an ominous and slightly threatening presence. I knew the Western press reports were exaggerated but I had no idea of the degree.

I did not, as with Paul on the road to Damascus, undergo a conversion and find a long-lost Jerusalem. But I was pleased at how easy it was to meet Soviet people and how readily they told you what they thought. It was mostly the little things that surprised me. Did you know the Soviet people sunbathe standing up and eat slices of warm fat with garlic? Or that you can see a whole smile full of gold teeth if you are friendly enough? And that the USSR has the most open black market I have ever experienced with enthusiastic waiters in the lead to change money at highly attractive rates. The difficulty was to set my own first impressions aside in order to focus on what was changing. The frankness of the people certainly made this easier to do.

One lasting overall impression is that for better or worse there is a genuinely different social system in the USSR. People have had different fears and expectations from Westerners for many decades now. So when trying to cram the Soviet Union into the 21 editorial pages I have tried to avoid using the assumptions of my own political culture. Take the terms 'Left' and 'Right'. Is Gorbachev, for example, a leftist or a rightist? He is pushing for more private involvement in the economy and more market freedom. That might put him on the Right. But he also believes in giving workers more say and reducing the power of the traditional authorities. Themes of the Left I would have thought. Dividing the Soviet political spectrum into conservatives and radicals is probably more realistic.

Even the basic questions are different. In the West some hope and others fear that the USSR is drifting into capitalism. But for the Soviet people that is not the issue at all. There is no significant or even insignificant force pushing in this direction. What matters to the people I talked to is the freedom to organize around issues they feel are important; the right to travel, to write what they like, and to make whatever music they want. And finding enough good food and consumer goods in the shops. It was my sense that if socialism could provide these things that would be fine with them. There seemed no burning desire to own shares or get rich quick although there were certainly some very romantic images of the West.

Perhaps the most difficult thing in doing a magazine about a place like the Soviet Union at this point in history is that things are so much in flux. I live in dread that the day this magazine gets pushed through your mailbox a story will appear in the daily press that clearly shows I got it all wrong. A military coup perhaps or a police round-up of dissenters. I don't think this will happen but if it does I hope my sense of solidarity with those being rounded up will put personal pique well into the background.

Letters
Letter from China
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Dexter Tiranti
Reviews: including Best of the Year
Country profile: Central African Republic

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Chris Duggan
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