Gorbachev Perestroika
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and began a program of reform built around two ideas: perestroika, meaning "restructuring," and glasnost, or "openness." He intended to revive a stagnating socialist system, not to end it. Yet the changes he set in motion loosened the Party's grip on the economy, the press, and the republics, and within seven years the Soviet Union no longer existed.
The background was a country in slow decline. Under Leonid Brezhnev, growth had faltered, consumer goods were scarce, and technology lagged behind the West. The centrally planned economy was burdened by heavy military spending, including the costly war in Afghanistan that began in 1979, and by falling oil revenues in the mid-1980s. Brezhnev's death in 1982 was followed by two short-lived leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. When Gorbachev, then in his fifties, took office in March 1985, he was far younger than his predecessors and arrived with a mandate to get the country moving.
His early efforts focused on discipline and acceleration of production, but these achieved little. By 1986 and 1987 he turned to deeper changes. Perestroika allowed limited private enterprise through cooperatives, gave state firms more autonomy, and later introduced partly competitive elections to a new legislature. Glasnost eased censorship, permitted discussion of past repressions under Stalin, and encouraged citizens to criticize officials. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the initial official secrecy surrounding it, strengthened Gorbachev's argument that the system needed greater transparency. In foreign policy he pursued arms-control agreements with the United States and ultimately withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
The consequences outran his intentions. Partial market reforms disrupted existing supply networks without creating a working replacement, leading to shortages and public frustration. Open debate fed nationalist movements in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and elsewhere. In 1989, Soviet restraint allowed communist governments across Eastern Europe to fall, largely without Soviet intervention. A failed hardline coup in August 1991 fatally weakened both Gorbachev and the Party, and in December of that year the USSR was formally dissolved into independent states.
Historians still debate how much blame or credit Gorbachev deserves. Some argue the system was already doomed by economic and structural problems, while others stress his choices, particularly his reluctance to use large-scale force. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and is widely credited with helping end the Cold War peacefully. In Russia, however, many people associate him with economic hardship and lost status, so his reputation remains sharply divided at home even as he is often admired abroad.