Comment: Perestroika. (1991, 20 Marks)
Perestroika (“restructuring”) was the programme of reform launched by Mikhail Gorbachev after he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party on 11 March 1985, and set out in his book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987). Its purpose was to save socialism, not end it: to revive a stagnating command economy while keeping the Party’s rule. Within six years it had instead dissolved the Soviet state and ended the Cold War.
Why reform became unavoidable
- Zastoi (stagnation): growth had decelerated since the mid-1970s; gross output targets rewarded quantity over productivity, and János Kornai’s “soft budget constraint” meant loss-making enterprises were never allowed to fail.
- The technological gap: an economy built to move steel and coal could not diffuse computers and photocopiers that threatened the state’s control of information.
- Overstretch: the arms race, the war in Afghanistan and subsidies to clients such as Cuba drained resources, and the 1986 oil-price collapse cut hard-currency earnings.
The four strands of reform
| Programme | Aim | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Uskoreniye (acceleration), 1985 | Faster growth within the plan | Abandoned within two years |
| Perestroika proper, 1986–88 | Enterprise autonomy, cooperatives | Neither plan nor market |
| Glasnost (openness), from 1986 | Expose corruption, weaken bureaucratic resistance | Delegitimised the regime’s past |
| Demokratizatsiya, 1988–90 | A popular base against Party conservatives | Elected bodies more legitimate than the Party |
- The Law on State Enterprises (1987) gave firms self-financing and elected managers, and the Law on Cooperatives (1988) legalised private business in all but name. Enterprises raised wages and cut cheap output while still facing no hard budget constraint, producing shortages and inflation.
- Politically, the March 1989 elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies were the first competitive national polls since 1917, and in March 1990 Article 6, guaranteeing the Party’s leading role, was abolished.
- Abroad, “new thinking” replaced class struggle with interdependence and “common human values”: the INF Treaty (1987), withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989) and abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine let Eastern Europe go.
Why it failed: sequencing and structure
- Glasnost outpaced perestroika: political voice arrived before economic relief, so citizens learnt the truth about Stalin’s terror and the Molotov–Ribbentrop protocols as shops emptied. Alexis de Tocqueville’s dictum (The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856) that reform is a bad government’s most dangerous moment fits closely.
- The nationalities question: liberalisation in a federation of national republics became the liberalisation of nationalism, from the Baltic declarations of 1990 to Boris Yeltsin’s Russia turning its institutions against the centre.
- Agency versus structure: Archie Brown (The Gorbachev Factor, 1996) credits Gorbachev’s choices with the peaceful transformation; Stephen Kotkin (Armageddon Averted, 2001) sees a system unreformable without unravelling.
- The Chinese contrast: Deng Xiaoping’s economic-first reform in an agrarian, largely unitary state shows why Moscow lacked an equivalent path, and Xi Jinping has repeatedly cited the Soviet collapse as a warning to his own Party.
Significance for international politics
- For constructivists such as Alexander Wendt, Gorbachev’s redefinition of Soviet identity, not a shift in material power, explains why the Cold War ended peacefully.
- For India, new thinking produced the Delhi Declaration signed with Rajiv Gandhi (27 November 1986) on a nuclear-weapon-free and non-violent world; its failure brought the loss of India’s principal strategic partner, the end of rupee–rouble trade and a push towards the 1991 liberalisation.
Conclusion
Perestroika succeeded as foreign policy and political liberation but failed as economic reform. It was the Soviet system’s last attempt at self-renewal, and its sequencing turned a chronic decline into a rapid collapse. That outcome still divides its heirs: Vladimir Putin calls the Soviet collapse the century’s greatest geopolitical catastrophe, while Beijing studies it as the path to avoid.