Perestroika set out to rescue Soviet socialism and helped end it
Mikhail Gorbachev's restructuring was meant to make the planned economy work better, not abolish it. Instead, within six years it had legalised private businesses, let Soviet citizens pick a national legislature for the first time, loosened the Cold War, and fed the nationalist currents that pulled the Soviet Union apart in 1991.
The word, meaning restructuring, was coined by the economist and sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya. Gorbachev used it in a speech on December 10, 1984, and began putting it into practice three months later when he took power. By the early 1980s the economy had stagnated, the political system had seized up and public discontent was growing; in a May 1985 speech in Leningrad he openly admitted slowing growth and poor living standards. The first phase, called uskoreniye or acceleration, only tinkered with central planning. Deeper changes came later.
Two laws marked the shift. The Law on State Enterprise of July 1987 let factories set output according to demand once they had met state orders, and made them cover their own costs. The Law on Cooperatives of May 1988 went further, allowing private ownership of businesses in services, manufacturing and foreign trade for the first time since Lenin's New Economic Policy ended in 1928; cooperative cafés and shops soon appeared. A 1987 joint-venture law opened the door to foreign investors, first capped at 49 percent and later relaxed after Western complaints. Alexander Yakovlev, head of the party's propaganda department from 1985, is seen as the intellectual engine of the programme.
Politically, Gorbachev decided the party's old guard could not be reformed from within, and in January 1987 he appealed directly to the public for democratisation. In the March 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, voters across the country crossed out unopposed Communist candidates, stunning the leadership. Abroad, his new political thinking set aside class struggle in favour of shared human interests and security through politics rather than arms, and it brought the Cold War to a close.
The costs were steep. Reform worsened shortages and deepened social and economic strain, and it is often blamed for fuelling nationalism in the republics. By the party congress of July 1990 those forces were pulling hard towards the exit. Sociologist Mikhail Anipkin, drawing on his father's career as a party official, argues that perestroika was a revolution driven by party workers in their forties.
Source: Perestroika
