Perestroika
Perestroika was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s, widely associated with CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy-reform. literally means "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the political economy of the Soviet Union in an attempt to end the Era of Stagnation.
allowed more independent actions from various ministries and introduced many market-like reforms. The purported goal of was not to end the planned economy, but rather to make socialism work more efficiently to better meet the needs of Soviet citizens by adopting elements of liberal economics. The process of implementing added to existing shortages and created political, social, and economic tensions within the Soviet Union. Furthermore, it is often blamed for the political rise of nationalism and nationalist political parties in the constituent republics of the USSR.
The motivation for stemmed from a combination of entrenched economic stagnation, political sclerosis, and growing social dissatisfaction that had taken root in the early 1980s. These conditions compelled Gorbachev and his allies to initiate broad reforms to save the system from collapse.
Gorbachev first used the term during a speech on December 10, 1984, and began implementing his reforms three months later when coming to power. The era of lasted from 1985 until 1991, and is often argued to be a significant cause of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Russian-British sociologist Mikhail Anipkin views as a revolution of quadragenarians. In his 2024 book, Party Worker: The Rise of a Soviet Regional Leader, Anipkin argues that perestroika was desperately sought by the younger generation of Party functionaries, and that Mikhail Gorbachev sensed that demand. Anipkin draws his arguments from the political biography of his own father,, a high-ranking Party apparatchik, who enthusiastically accepted and sought to further democracy within the Party.
With respect to foreign policy, Gorbachev promoted "new political thinking": de-ideologization of international politics, abandoning the concept of class struggle, prioritizing universal human interests over the interests of any class, increasing interdependence of the world, and promoting mutual security based on political rather than on military instruments. This doctrine represented a significant shift from the previous principles of Soviet foreign relations. Its implementation marked the end of the Cold War.
Political reforms
Gorbachev had concluded that implementing his reforms outlined at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 required more than discrediting the "Old Guard", those with a Marxist-Leninist political orientation. He changed his strategy from trying to work through the CPSU as it existed and instead embraced a degree of political liberalization. In January 1987, he appealed over the heads of the party to the people and called for democratization. Earlier members of local soviets were appointed by local Communist Party branches; now they were to be elected by the people from among various candidates.The March 1989 election of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union marked the first time that voters of the Soviet Union ever chose the membership of a national legislative body. The results of the election stunned the ruling elite. Throughout the country, voters crossed unopposed Communist candidates off the ballot, many of them prominent party officials, taking advantage of the nominal privilege of withholding approval of the listed candidates.
By the time of the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress in July 1990, it was clear that Gorbachev's reforms came with sweeping, unintended consequences, as nationalities of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union pulled harder than ever to break away from the Union and ultimately dismantle the Communist Party.
Economic reforms
In May 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in Leningrad in which he admitted the slowing of economic development, and inadequate living standards.The program was furthered at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party in Gorbachev's report to the congress, in which he spoke about "perestroika", "uskoreniye", "human factor", "glasnost", and "expansion of the khozraschyot".
During the initial period of Mikhail Gorbachev's time in power, he talked about modifying central planning but did not make any truly fundamental changes. Gorbachev and his team of economic advisors then introduced more fundamental reforms, which became known as perestroika.
At the June 1987 plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev presented his "basic theses", which laid the political foundation of economic reform for the remainder of the existence of the Soviet Union.
In July 1987, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union passed the Law on State Enterprise. The law stipulated that state enterprises were free to determine output levels based on demand from consumers and other enterprises. Enterprises had to fulfil state orders, but they could dispose of the remaining output as they saw fit. However, at the same time, the state still held control over the means of production for these enterprises, thus limiting their ability to enact full-cost accountability. Enterprises bought input from suppliers at negotiated contract prices. Under the law, enterprises became self-financing; that is, they had to cover expenses through revenues. Finally, the law shifted control over the enterprise operations from ministries to elected workers' collectives. Gosplan's responsibilities were to supply general guidelines and national investment priorities.
The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1988, was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy was abolished in 1928, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. The law initially imposed high taxes and employment restrictions, but it later revised these to avoid discouraging private-sector activity. Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene.
Alexander Yakovlev was considered to be the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reform program of glasnost and perestroika. In the summer of 1985, Yakovlev became head of the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee. He argued in favor of the reform programs and played a key role in executing those policies.
The most significant of Gorbachev's reforms in the foreign economic sector allowed foreigners to invest in the Soviet Union in the form of joint ventures with Soviet ministries, state enterprises, and cooperatives. The original version of the Soviet Joint Venture Law, which went into effect in June 1987, limited foreign shares of a Soviet venture to 49 percent and required that Soviet citizens occupy the positions of chairman and general manager. After potential Western partners complained, the government revised the regulations to allow majority foreign ownership and control. Under the terms of the Joint Venture Law, the Soviet partner supplied labor, infrastructure, and a potentially large domestic market. The foreign partner supplied capital, technology, entrepreneurial expertise, and in many cases, products and services of world-competitive quality.
Gorbachev's economic changes did not do much to improve the country's sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms decentralized things to some extent, although price controls remained, as did the ruble's inconvertibility and most government controls over the means of production.
Comparison with China
Perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up have similar origins but very different effects on their respective countries' economies. Both efforts occurred in large socialist countries attempting to liberalize their economies, but while China's GDP has grown consistently since the late 1980s, national GDP in the USSR and in many of its successor states fell precipitously throughout the 1990s, a period often referred to as the wild nineties. Gorbachev's reforms were gradualist and maintained many of the macroeconomic aspects of the planned economy.Reform was largely focused on industry and on cooperatives, and a limited role was given to the development of foreign investment and international trade. Factory managers were expected to meet state demands for goods, but to find their own funding. Perestroika reforms went far enough to create new bottlenecks in the Soviet economy but arguably did not go far enough to effectively streamline it.
Reform and opening up was, by contrast, a bottom-up attempt at reform, focusing on light industry and agriculture. Economic reforms were fostered through the development of "Special Economic Zones", designed for export and to attract foreign investment, municipally managed Township and Village Enterprises and a "dual pricing" system leading to the steady phasing out of state-dictated prices. Greater latitude was given to managers of state-owned factories, while capital was made available to them through a reformed banking system and through fiscal policies. Perestroika was expected to lead to results such as market pricing and privately sold produce, but the Union dissolved before advanced stages were reached.
Another fundamental difference is that where perestroika was accompanied by greater political freedoms under Gorbachev's glasnost policies, reform and opening up has been accompanied by continued authoritarian rule and a suppression of political dissidents, most notably at Tiananmen Square. Gorbachev acknowledged this difference but maintained that it was unavoidable and that perestroika would have been doomed to defeat and revanchism by the nomenklatura without glasnost, because conditions in the Soviet Union were not identical to those in China. Gorbachev cited a line from a 1986 newspaper article that he felt encapsulated this reality: "The apparatus broke Khrushchev's neck and the same thing will happen now."
Another difference is that Soviet Union faced strong secession threats from its ethnic regions and a primacy challenge by the RSFSR. Gorbachev's extension of regional autonomy removed the suppression from existing ethnic-regional tension, while Deng's reforms did not alter the tight grip of the central government on any of its autonomous regions. The Soviet Union's dual nature, part supranational union of republics and part unitary state, played a part in the difficulty of controlling the pace of restructuring, especially once the new Russian Communist Party was formed and posed a challenge to the primacy of the CPSU. Gorbachev described this process as a "parade of sovereignties" and identified it as the factor that most undermined the gradualism of restructuring and the preservation of the Soviet Union.