The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 647Gorbachev had served as minister of agriculture
from 1978 and knew that Soviet farming was failing. In
1981 Brezhnev had been forced to acknowledge the
regime’s economic failure before the Central Commit-
tee; food production had fallen to dangerously low lev-
els for three consecutive years and stood at an
embarrassing 30 percent of the planned harvest. The
Soviet Union could not feed itself and imported forty-
three million tons of grain, much of it coming from the
United States. Simultaneously, the war in Afghanistan
was a great drain on Russian finances and morale. In
1982 the Politburo decided to seek economic stability
by curtailing the enormously expensive arms race with
the West. A few months later, however, President
Ronald Reagan of the United States announced plans
for a new weapons system, the Strategic Defense Initia-
tive, that theoretically would provide a missile shield
for the United States. This plan, soon dubbed “star
wars,” required vast new spending to develop antimis-
sile technology. Reagan, who considered the USSR “the
Evil Empire” and “the focus of all evil in the modern
world,” was willing to spend the United States deeply
into debt to combat the Soviet Union. By 1985 the
United States had become a debtor nation, but Mikhail
Gorbachev came to power with another great concern
to add to the human rights pressures, the antiwar
mood, and the economic failures of the Soviet Union.
In his first weeks in power, Gorbachev launched a
liberalizing revolution. He retired older leaders and
hard-liners while promoting reformers and westernizers
such as Eduard Schevardnadze, who replaced an old-
line Communist, Andrei Gromyko, as foreign minister.
Within one year, Gorbachev had changed 70 percent
of all cabinet ministers and 50 percent of the higher ad-
ministration. The Gorbachev revolution was character-
ized by two objectives: glasnost(openness) and perestroika
(restructuring). Glasnostmeant a freer political and cul-
tural life in which criticism of the party and state were
possible; Gorbachev even allowed television broadcasts
depicting the quagmire in Afghanistan and its increas-
ing casualty rate. Perestroika meant reforming political
and economic structures to create more democracy and
efficiency (see document 32.3).
Gorbachev’s two doctrines also led to a “détente of-
fensive” to persuade the West to curtail the cold war
and its costly arms race. To prove his earnestness, he
announced a unilateral freeze on medium range missiles
during his first month in office. In September 1985 the
USSR offered a 50 percent cut in arms in return for a
Western cut in the star wars program. Many Western
leaders, led by Margaret Thatcher, were greatly im-
pressed by this beginning, and European opinion soon
strongly favored the curtailment of cold war military
expenditures. In the fall of 1985 more than 100,000
people demonstrated in London to stop these ruinous
expenses, and Gorbachev received popular greetings
during visits to the West. Reagan and Gorbachev held
six hours of face-to-face meetings in Geneva, but Rea-Illustration 32.4
The Gorbachev Revolution.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general
secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union in 1985, was the leading
figure in the revolutions of 1989. His de-
termined efforts to reform the USSR and
Eastern Europe created the environment
in which Communist governments were
toppled, and this made him enormously
popular across Europe, as this 1987
photo of his state visit to Prague shows.
Note that Gorbachev (smiling at center)
seems much happier than the man with
the forced smile behind him, Gustav
Husak, the president of Czechoslovakia.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize
for 1990; Husak was deposed.