Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms up for more public criticism, evident in Nina Andreyeva's critical letter in a March edition of "Sovetskaya Rossiya". Gorbachev acknowledged that his liberalising policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika" owed a great deal to Alexander Dubček's "Socialism with a human face". Indeed, when one reporter asked him what was the difference between his policies and the Prague Spring, Gorbachev replied, "Nineteen years". The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1988, was perhaps the most radical economic reform of the early Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of
Union of Sovereign States confederation. The New Union Treaty () was a draft treaty that would have replaced the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and thus would have replaced the Soviet Union with a new entity named the Union of Sovereign States, an attempt of Mikhail Gorbachev to salvage and reform the Soviet Union. A ceremony of the Russian SFSR signing the treaty was scheduled for 20 August 1991, but was prevented by the August Coup a day earlier. The preparation of this treaty was known as the Novo-Ogarevo process (новоогаревский процесс), named after Novo-Ogaryovo, a governmental estate where the work