Gorbachev's reforms: glasnost and perestroika
Gorbachev Takes Power, 1985
Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party on 11 March 1985. At 54 he was strikingly younger than his predecessors. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, he was fit, articulate, and deeply aware that the Soviet Union faced a serious systemic crisis: a stagnant economy, a demoralised population, and a military bogged down in Afghanistan.
Gorbachev did not intend to dismantle the Soviet Union. He wanted to save it. He believed the Soviet system was fundamentally sound but had been corrupted by Stalinist bureaucracy and Brezhnev-era stagnation. His goal was to make communism work better — not to replace it with capitalism or multi-party democracy. This misjudgement of what was needed would prove fateful.
Gorbachev wanted to reform and save the Soviet system, not destroy it. His twin reform programmes — glasnost and perestroika — were intended to modernise socialism. Instead, they unleashed political forces that the Soviet system could not contain.
Glasnost: Openness
Glasnost (openness) relaxed censorship and allowed unprecedented public discussion of Soviet problems, history and corruption. Previously banned books were published; newspapers began criticising government policies; television showed the reality of Afghanistan rather than propaganda victories; the crimes of Stalinism were discussed openly for the first time since the Khrushchev Thaw.
A pivotal moment for glasnost was the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine on 26 April 1986. The Soviet government initially tried to conceal the accident and its scale, but glasnost made this impossible. Journalists and officials reported the truth; the government was forced to evacuate entire towns and acknowledge the scale of the disaster. Chernobyl became a symbol of Soviet institutional failure — the gap between official claims of technological achievement and the reality of a crumbling infrastructure.
Perestroika (restructuring) was Gorbachev's attempt to reform the Soviet economic system. It introduced limited market mechanisms: state enterprises were given more autonomy, cooperatives and small private businesses were permitted, and some price controls were relaxed. Politically, perestroika included a degree of democratisation: competitive elections were introduced for seats in a new parliament (the Congress of People's Deputies), held in March 1989.
Perestroika created more problems than it solved. The relaxation of price controls caused inflation; the partial introduction of market forces disrupted existing supply chains without creating new ones; state enterprises, freed from some controls, raised wages without increasing productivity. Economic output fell in many sectors. Rather than renewing Soviet socialism, perestroika destabilised it.
International Relations: The INF Treaty
One area where Gorbachev achieved genuine success was foreign policy. He recognised that the arms race was economically ruinous and that the Afghan War must end. He developed a personal rapport with US President Reagan and in December 1987 signed the INF Treaty, which eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons (intermediate-range missiles) — the first arms control agreement actually to reduce nuclear stockpiles rather than merely cap their growth.
Soviet troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989 — a tacit admission that the war had been a mistake. Gorbachev also announced that the Brezhnev Doctrine was effectively dead: Eastern European states would not be propped up by Soviet military force. This announcement — sometimes called the “Sinatra Doctrine” by Gorbachev's spokesman — opened the door to the revolutions of 1989.
The INF Treaty (December 1987) was the first US–Soviet agreement to actually eliminate nuclear weapons rather than cap their numbers. It marked the effective end of the Second Cold War and demonstrated that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader willing to make real concessions.
The fundamental problem with Gorbachev's reforms was that they were politically revolutionary but economically confused. Glasnost allowed public exposure of Soviet failures — corruption, environmental disasters, the Afghan War — without providing the improved material conditions that might have built public support for the system. As people spoke more freely, they began expressing not just demands for better management of socialism but desires for genuine political freedom and, in the national republics, for independence.
Conservative party officials and KGB elements feared the pace of change and blamed Gorbachev for destabilising the state. Reformers like Boris Yeltsin felt change was too slow and too limited. Gorbachev found himself squeezed between two forces he had inadvertently created: a conservative backlash and a democratic movement he could not satisfy without abandoning the party's monopoly on power. By 1990–91 the system he had tried to save was visibly disintegrating.