Life of Steve continued

    Mikhail Gorbachev tried to give the Soviet Union a whole new lease on life. He took over the job as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985. This made him the head of the whole Soviet Union.
     He headed up the Sovie Union for only six years. During that time, he launched bold new initiatives to shake up Soviet society. . 'Perestroika' was  the word he used  which meant increasing automation to increase labour productivity in the Soviet Union. 'Glasnost' was another favourite word of Gorbachev's. Here it meant transparency, or opening up the whole political system to be seen  or examined by everybody. Meanwhile Gorbachev pushed for open and fair elections.
    But like many reformers everywhere in the world, Gorbachev failed.
    As soon as he changed one thing, new problems emerged. "Beneath its solid-looking exterior," writes Jim Laxer, "the Soviet Union was in such dire condition, that any effort to transform it, merely propelled it toward collapse."
    In l989, all the pro-Soviet governments in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslavakia and Romania collapsed. For Gorbachev refused the leaders of these countries to use their troops or Soviet troops against the protestors in these countries. As a result, the protestors overthrew the communist governments in these countries.
    Then in l991, on the heels of a failed hardline pro-communist coup, the Soviet Union itself vanished. It collapsed into its constituent parts. Russia, the largest republic in the former Soviet Union was now ruled by a proto-capitalist leader named Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin began to privatize and sell off large parts of the former Soviet economy. And in other former Soviet republics, the leaders there were doing the same thing.
     China and Vietnam were both ruled by communist governments. But these governments were launching their countries into capitalism North Korea and Cuba remained as the only communist countries left in the world.It was an amazing transformation that nobody predicted. Steve certainly didn't .
       While all these changes took place the Canadian Communist Party split into two factions.
       On one hand, hardline communists like Steve denounced Gorbachev as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, or C.I.A. "I like this man," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in effect of Gorbachev. "I can do business with him."
      This endorsement from an ultra-conservative British Prime Minister proved to Steve  and others that Gorbachev was a CIA mole. He'd burrowed his way into leading the Soviet Union , they said, in order to destroy it.
   But others in the party supported Gorbachev's attempts to remake the Soviet Union. When  the Soviet Union disappeared they left the party. Fights and disagreements tore apart friendships, and in some cases families. "I don't see my son anymore," one hardline communist told this author in 1991. "He's left the party
and joined another party."