ight months in the Soviet capital left me convinced that perestroika, Gorbachev's "restructuring" of the
-
Soviet economy, remains a phantom. It has not yet touched the average Russian. If a political rival to ~orbachev were to look his countrymen square in the eye and ask, as Ronald Reagan once did in a somewhat different context, "Are you better off now than you were three years ago?", the an- swer would be a reverberating "No."
Perestroika is, as Soviet citizens t...