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Abstract
The perestroika process today is, on the one hand, in the grip of problems that are snowballing and, on the other, faces an ever more appreciable and dangerous "conceptual insufficiency" in reaching effective decisions on these problems. The mighty ideological legacy, which is, however, no longer indisputable, together with the multitude of deep-rooted and newborn prejudices and delusions multiplied by the interests and motivations behind them in broad strata of society that are by no means confined to the "nomenklatura"—all this in large measure predetermines both the quite frequent rejection of healthy decisions and the fact that the most rational of the decisions that are made are distorted and emasculated, while the wrong decisions are introduced with an enthusiasm that is worthy of better application. This is why the unprejudiced analysis of urgent problems is one of the most important and essentially necessary conditions to the success of perestroika in its truly democratic, long-range variant.