The changes that took place in the Soviet Union
after Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded to the posi-
tion of general secretary of the Communist Party
and to the leadership of the country in 1985
astonished the world. Gorbachev set a new
agenda for relations with the Warsaw Pact allies
and allowed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria,
Romania and Hungary to choose their own inter-
nal and external relations. It was the end of com-
munist one-party states, so jealously defended
by Big Brother for four decades. Even more
astonishingly Gorbachev laid to rest the ghost
of a revanchist Germany and allowed the East
Germans to choose unification with the West. His
policies went a long way to dispelling Western
fears of the Soviet Union. Disarmament lay at the
heart of the Kremlin’s new policies. ‘Gorby’ was
welcomed and applauded in the streets of Bonn
and amid the skyscrapers of New York. People in
the West pressured their governments to respond
more quickly and warmly to the Soviet leader’s
offer of disarmament and peace, and Gorbachev’s
genuine desire to end the Cold War finally over-
came Western suspicions. The Warsaw Pact was
dissolved and a united Germany joined NATO.
The Cold War ended in 1991 and the Soviet
Union and the US began working towards com-
mon aims in the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
Gorbachev outlined his ideas for radical
change in his book Perestroika, published in 1987
as a paperback all over the world, its subtitle New
Thinking for Our Country and the World. In it,Gorbachev explains his aims to ‘restructure’ and
reform Soviet society, to rekindle the initiative
and personal responsibility of every Soviet citizen.
Corruption and inefficiency would be ended, the
falsehood that cloaked the oppression of the
people – who were ‘guaranteed’ constitutional
freedoms that existed only on paper – would be
purged. The twin of perestroikaor ‘restructuring’
was glasnost or ‘openness’. ‘Restructuring’ and
‘openness’ were mild words for Gorbachev’s
objectives which, in the context of Soviet history,
were truly revolutionary. The people would be
granted genuine legal freedoms and the right to
criticise, to express their views, to choose on merit
(by exercising their votes) between rival candi-
dates for important political functions. Did
Gorbachev indeed intend finally to rid the Soviet
Union of the ideology of the Russian Revolution
and all its works?
A careful reading of Perestroika reveals the
schism in Gorbachev’s thinking which was there
from the start. He was not a democrat in the
Western sense or a convert to the view that cap-
italism would rescue the Soviet Union from its
economic backwardness. He was a socialist
reformer, inspired by beliefs that were in line with
Western idealism, that is beliefs in individual civic
rights and freedoms, and he exerted all his power
and employed all his talents to allow the Soviet
people to gain them for the first time in Soviet
history. The distinguished dissidents Anatoly
Sharansky and Andrei Sakharov were released,(^1) Chapter 69
THE SOVIET UNION, CRISIS AND REFORM
GORBACHEV, YELTSIN AND PUTIN