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 treaty was further reformed into the Commonwealth of Independent States. Union of Sovereign States The Union of Sovereign States () was the proposed name of a reorganization of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a new confederation. Proposed by the then President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, the proposal was an attempt to avert an end to the Soviet Union. The proposal was never implemented in the wake of the August Coup in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union ultimately occurred on December 26th of that year. The overall proposal was resurrected as the Commonwealth of