Glasnost really does know no bounds in the Soviet Union these days: anybody with a personal computer and a laser printer can start his own magazine, UK Education Secretary Kenneth Baker told a posse of students at Moscow State University on Monday; the information technology revolution is bound to reduce the power of central bureaucracies, he went on, which is precisely why the Soviet Union is so far behind in civil uses of computers and communications – and pre-Gorbachev, the interpreter would have been given a one-way ticket to Siberia simply for translating the message delivered by Our Ken; according to the Financial Times, the 200 students present just laughed.
