leader, Gorbachev had said that one of the important things on the agenda was a “perestroika of the forms and methods of running the economy.” By 1987 the concept for Gorbachev was much broader and clearly embraced radical political reform and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev’s thinking at that time was set out in a book, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World. While the ideas contained were far removed from traditional Soviet dogma, they by no means yet reflected the full evolution of Gorbachev’s own position (and, with it, his understanding of perestroika). In 1987 Gorbachev was talking about radical reform of the existing system. During the run-up to the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party, held in the summer of 1988, he came to the conclusion that the system had to be transformed so comprehensively as to become something different in kind. In 1987 he still spoke about “communism,” although he had redefined it to make freedom and the rule of law among its unfamiliar values; by the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev had given up speaking about “communism.” The “socialism,” of which he continued to speak, had become socialism of a social democratic type.
Perestroika became an overarching conception, under which a great many new concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse after 1985. These included such departures from the Marxist-Leninist lexicon as glasnost (openness, transparency), pravovoe gosudarstvo (a state based on the rule of law), checks and balances, and pluralism. One of the most remarkable innovations was Gorbachev’s breaking of the taboo on speaking positively about pluralism. Initially (in 1987) this was a “socialist pluralism” or a “pluralism of opinion.” That, however, opened the way for others in the Soviet Union to talk positively about “pluralism” without the socialist qualifier. By early 1990 Gorbachev himself had embraced the notion of “political pluralism,” doing so at the point at which he proposed to the Central Committee removing from the Soviet Constitution the guaranteed “leading role” of the Communist Party.
Even perestroika as understood in the earliest years of Gorbachev’s leadership-not least because of its embrace of glasnost-opened the way for real political debate and political movement in a system which had undergone little fundamental political change for decades. In his 1987 book, Perestroika,
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Mikhail Gorbachev reacts to the announcement of foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze’ planned resignation at a Congress of the People’s Deputies meeting held December 20, 1990. BORIS YURCHENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. Gorbachev wrote: “Glasnost, criticism and self-criticism are not just a new campaign. They have been proclaimed and must become a norm in the Soviet way of life . . . . There is no democracy, nor can there be, without glasnost. And there is no present-day socialism, nor can there be, without democracy.” Such exhortation was alarming to those who wished to preserve the Soviet status quo or to revert to the status quo ante. It was, though, music to the ears of people who wished to promote the more rapid democratization of the Soviet system, even to advocate moving further and faster than Gorbachev at the time was prepared to endorse.
If perestroika is considered as an epoch in Soviet and Russian history, rather than a concept (though conceptual change in a hitherto ideocratic system was crucially important), it can be seen as one in which a Pandora’s box was opened. The system, whatever its failings, had been highly effective in controlling and suppressing dissent, and it was far from being on the point of collapse in 1985. Perestroika produced both intended and unintended consequences. From the outset Gorbachev’s aims included a liberalization of the Soviet system and the ending of the Cold War. Liberalization, in fact, developed into democratization (the latter term being one that Gorbachev used from the beginning, although its meaning, too, developed within the course of the next several years) and the Cold War was over by the end of the 1980s. A major aspect of perestroika in its initial conception was, however, to inject a new dynamism into the Soviet economy. In that respect it failed. Indeed, Gorbachev came to believe that the Soviet economic system, just like the political system, needed not reform but dismantling and to be rebuilt on different foundations.
The ultimate unintended consequence of pere-stroika was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Liberalization and democratization turned what Gorbachev had called “pre-crisis phenomena” (most
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notably, economic stagnation) during the early 1980s into a full-blown crisis of survival of the state by 1990- 1991. Measuring such an outcome against the initial aims of perestroika suggests its failure. But the goals of the foremost proponents of perestroika, and of Mikhail Gorbachev personally, rapidly evolved, and democratization came to be given a higher priority than economic reform. At the end of this experiment in the peaceful transformation of a highly authoritarian system, there were fifteen newly independent states and Russia itself had become a freer country than at any point in its previous history. Taken in conjunction with the benign transformation of East-West relations, these results constitute major achievements that more than counterbalance the failures. They point also to the fact that there could be no blueprint for the democratization of a state that had been at worst totalitarian and at best highly authoritarian for some seven decades. Perestroika became a process of trial and error, but one that was underpinned by ideas and values radically different from those which constituted the ideological foundations of the unreformed Soviet system. See also: DEMOCRATIZATION; GLASNOST; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; NEW POLITICAL THINKING
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. New York: Oxford University Press. English, Robert D. (2000). Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. London: Collins. Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Mlynar, Zdenek. (2002). Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House.
occur in an industrially backward Russia. According to classical Marxism, only a society of advanced capitalism with a large working class was ripe for communist revolution. Russia met neither prerequisite. Further, Karl Marx conceived of a two-stage revolution: first the bourgeois revolution, then in sequence the proletarian revolution establishing a dictatorship for transition to communism. Trotsky argued that the two-stage theory did not apply. Rather, he said, Russia was in a stage of uneven development where both bourgeois and proletarian revolutions were developing together under the impact of the advanced West.
Trotsky predicted that once revolution broke out in Russia it would be in permanence as the result of an East-West dynamic. The bourgeois majority revolution would be overthrown by a conscious proletarian minority that would carry forward the torch of revolution. However, a second phase was necessary: namely, the proletarian revolution in Western Europe ignited by the Russian proletariat’s initiative; the West European proletariat now in power rescues the beleaguered proletarian minority in Russia; and the path is opened to the international communist revolution.
Trotsky’s theory seemed corroborated in the 1917 Russian revolution. Tsarism was overthrown by a bourgeois Provisional Government in February which the Bolsheviks then overthrew in October. However, the second phase posited by Trotsky’s theory, the West European revolution, did not materialize. The Bolsheviks faced the dilemma of how to sustain power where an advanced industrial economy did not exist. Was not Bolshevik rule doomed to failure without Western aid?
Usurping power, Josef Stalin answered Trotsky’s theory with his “socialism in one country.” Curiously, his recipe was similar to a strategy Trotsky earlier proposed, namely, command economy, forced industrialization, and collectivization. With the communist collapse in Russia in 1991 both Trotsky’s and Stalin’s theories became moot. See also: BOLSHEVISM; MARXISM; SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH
PERMANENT REVOLUTION
“Permanent Revolution” was Leon Trotsky’s explanation of how a communist revolution could
