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 with the United States and other Western European powers and unaddressed inefficiencies in the economy, led to stagnant economic growth under Alexei Kosygin, and further with Leonid Brezhnev and a growing disillusionment. After a younger vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev (b.1931), assumed leadership in 1985, (following two short-term elderly leaders who quickly died in succession), rapid steps were taken to transform the tottering Soviet economic system in the direction of a market economy once again. Gorbachev and his allies envisioned the introduction of an economy similar to Lenin's earlier New Economic Policy through a program of "perestroika", or restructuring, but their reforms