But Gorbachev and his program of perestroika are far less popular at home. Estee Lauder and Christian Dior opened exclusive shops on Gorky Street. Meanwhile, soap, sugar, tea, school notebooks, cigarettes, sausage and other meats, butter, fruits and vegetables, and even matches are scarce. Only rubles are plentiful. Only consummate statecraft can enable a king to save his throne when, after a long spell of oppressive rule, he sets to improving the lot of his subjects.
Chaos rides in on rising expectations.
Right now, in the dead of the Russian winter, Gorbachev may have reached his own most dangerous moment. Nonetheless, with remarkable imagination and daring, he has embarked on a course, perhaps now irreversible, that is reshaping the world. He is trying to transform a government that was not just bad or inept but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending into evil. He has been breaking up an old bloc to make way for a new Europe, altering the relationship of the Soviet empire with the rest of the world and changing the nature of the empire itself. He has made possible the end of the cold war and diminished the danger that a hot war will ever break out between the superpowers.