HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

Gorbachev represented a new generation of party leaders in the USSR. He was born in 1931 and joined the party in 1952. His predecessors had been survivors of the Stalin era and, like most of that generation, were conservative and risk-aversive. Gorbachev had a better education and had the opportunity to travel outside the country. While official state television told its citizens they lived better than West Germans, Gorbachev knew that was not true. He also realized that the United States had indeed succeeded in turning the war in Afghanistan into the Soviet's "Vietnam," a bloody quagmire that was draining resources and losing support at home. He believed that improving the economy would require deeper levels of reform and would only be possible by relieving the pressures of the Cold War in ways that would enable him to cut back on military spending.

He introduced two policy initiatives toward these ends. Perestroika aimed to structure the economy in more productive directions, while Glasnost sought to open up the political system to critique and reform. While the economic reforms were not successful, the political reforms transformed the Soviet Union, providing an unprecedented level of freedom of speech. Gorbachev hoped this would generate constructive political movements that would strengthen the legitimacy of the system. Glasnost unleashed a torrent of public debate, and in 1989, elections were held for the governors of the Soviet republics. Legislation introduced by Gorbachev ended the Party's monopoly on political power, which had been a fundamental tenet of Leninism. These reforms made Gorbachev enormously popular in Europe and the United States as he negotiated arms control agreements with President Reagan and permitted non-communist governments to come to power in Poland and other Eastern European countries that had been Soviet allies. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and in 1991, East and West Germany reunited. Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize and became one of the most admired men in the United States and Europe.

In his home country, however, Gorbachev faced growing problems. Economic reforms mainly provided opportunities for party elites to take control of state companies that were privatized and deepened the control of black market mafias. The Soviet leader found himself between a rock and a hard place. On one side, nationalist forces in the republics sought greater autonomy. In the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, annexed by Stalin during World War II, protest movements demanded independence. At the same time, party officials, long wary of his reform, concluded the process had gotten out of hand. On August 16, 1991, they placed Gorbachev under house arrest. Over the next four days, their efforts to regain control and end reform faced popular opposition, and key members of the military were unwilling to use repression. The leaders were arrested, and Gorbachev came back to Moscow on August 19.

Gorbachev's position had been critically weakened, however. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, directly elected in 1990, met with the leaders of the other republics. Over the next months, they negotiated a peaceful break-up of the USSR, and on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union ended after 70 years in existence. The Russian Republic emerged as one of 16 newly independent nation-states with Yeltsin as the President. Gorbachev was now president of a country that no longer existed. His policies transformed international relations, but at home, he was deeply unpopular, and his political career was over.

How do you explain the remarkable turn of events? Historians will debate this question for a long time, but we can start by remembering how the USSR came to be. A state in collapse after two and a half years of fighting a far superior foe left an institutional and political vacuum. A party with limited popular base but clear ideas about what it wanted to do with political power took control. It imposed its power in a very brutal fashion on a wary population. Other revolutions – in China, Iran, and Cuba, for example – came to power in part as mass movements. This provided leaders in those countries with a valuable reservoir of legitimacy. Machiavelli famously noted that a leader needed to be feared, but it was also good to be loved. The leaders of the Soviet Union always had to rely far more on fear. When Gorbachev asked his fellow citizens to work with him to make the country better, the limited reservoir of legitimacy became visible. Many of his fellow citizens did not want to make communism better; they wanted something different.

Moreover, Gorbachev's economic reforms did more harm than good for many Russians. Some commentators have criticized Gorbachev for trying to carry out economic and political reform at the same time. It would have been better, they argue, to do what Chinese Communist reformers did: focus on economic reform first. Yet, Chinese leaders were not facing the hostility of the United States as an impetus to maintain high levels of military spending. In order to pursue economic reform, Gorbachev needed to improve relations with the West, and its human rights record became an important test of his sincerity. Chinese leaders faced no such pressure. Gorbachev also faced a much more massive challenge on the economic front. China's command economy system was far less developed than in the USSR. Reforms in agriculture and state-owned enterprises could be carried out relatively easily and produce positive results quickly. In the Soviet Union, a deeply entrenched economic bureaucracy either sabotaged or coopted perestroika. This is another point at which the lack of underlying political legitimacy of the party undermined reform efforts.

Source: Marc Belanger and Mary Coleman, https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(Notre_Dame_IN)/Introduction_to_Comparative_Politics/04%3A_The_Political_Development_of_the_Russian_State
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