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
Communist Party of the Soviet Union Constitution referred to the party as "The leading and guiding force of Soviet society, and the nucleus of its political system, of all state and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union". State socialism was essential and from Stalin until Gorbachev, official discourse considered that private social and economic activity retarding the development of collective consciousness and the economy. Gorbachev supported privatization to a degree but based his policies on Lenin's and Bukharin's opinions of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, and supported complete state ownership over the commanding heights of the economy. Unlike liberalism, Marxism–Leninism