Russians Rally, Call Gorbachev Power Hungry
Right-wing Russian nationalists staged a venomous rally Sunday to complain about President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms, warming U.S.-Soviet relations and the growing nationalism in non-Russian republics.
About 2,000 people who gathered in deep snow near Soviet TV’s transmission tower heard speakers accuse Gorbachev of being power-hungry and plunging the Soviet Union into poverty and misery.
The right-wing groups were taking advantage of Gorbachev’s policy of greater openness to counter liberal measures they believe are hurting Russians, the country’s ethnic majority.
The harshest attack on Gorbachev came from Boris Unko of the United Front of Workers of Russia, a group fighting Gorbachev’s market-oriented economic reforms and unhappy about the nationalism in non-Russian republics.
Unko told the crowd that the people initially supported perestroika , Gorbachev’s reform program, but that “today we see what we got from that.”
Among the evils wrought by Gorbachev’s reforms, Unko said, are rock music, “modernism and pornography,” and insults to heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II and others “who built socialist society.” He said Gorbachev had sold out to the elite and forgotten about the working class.
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