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
Mikhail Gorbachev Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, who was made Secretary of the Central Committee in July 1985. For the first two years of his leadership, Gorbachev's watchword was "acceleration". He claimed that the Soviet Union would accelerate industrial output to the extent that it would match that of the United States by 2000. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom. By late 1986, he was referring to this reform as a failure. Drunkenness was a major social problem in the 1980s, and Andropov had planned for a