It was during this time that the Soviet records that were made available revealed that Senator Edward Kennedy’s message to Khrushchev was found. Senator Kennedy had sent a memo to Khrushchev about our President Reagan who seemed to be out of control and what would he suggest we should do to control him?

In May 1985, two months after coming to power, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a speech in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), in which he publicly criticized the inefficient economic system of the Soviet Union, making him the first Communist leader to do so.

This was followed by a February 1986 speech to the Communist Party Congress, in which he expanded upon the need for political and economic restructuring, or perestroika, and called for a new era of transparency and openness, or glasnost.

But by 1987, these early attempts at reform had achieved little, and Gorbachev embarked on a more ambitious program.

Gorbachev loosened centralized control of many businesses, allowing some farmers and manufacturers to decide for themselves which products to make, how many to produce, and what to charge for them.

This incentivized them to aim for profits, but it also went against the strict price controls that had been the bedrock of Soviet economic policies. It was a move that rankled many high-ranking officials who had previously headed these powerful central committees.

In May 1988, Gorbachev introduced a new policy that allowed for the creation of limited co-operative businesses within the Soviet Union, which led to the rise of privately owned stores, restaurants and manufacturers. Not since the short-lived New Economic Policy of Vladimir Lenin, instituted in 1922 after the Russian civil war, had aspects of free-market capitalism been permitted in the U.S.S.R.

But even here, Gorbachev tread lightly. As William Taubman, historian and author of Gorbachev: His Life and Times, notes, “This was a way of introducing private enterprise without calling it that.”

In fact, the term “private property” was never even used. Many of these new co-ops became the basis of the oligarchical system that continues to control power in Russia today.

 Perestroika Outrages Soviet Bureaucrats

It also allowed the surfacing of a very confidential memo:

SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY HAD ASKED MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

FOR HELP TO CONTROL PRESIDENT REAGAN

The Radical Left has always been an adversary to FREE SPEECH

REAGAN today WOULD HAVE BEEN TREATED LIKE TRUMP

And Kennedy today would have been guilty of treason

REAGAN & TRUMP have saved the freedom the revolutionaries won two centuries ago

With another 4 years of TRUMP and then 8 years for PENCE

Our Freedom could be secure for possibly another century.

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Freedom is only one generation away from extinction. –Ronald Reagan

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