Perestroika

The term perestroika, which means restructuring, has existed in the Russian political vocabulary since the 18th century, but today, it is inextricably linked with the reformation movement initiated in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was the secretary general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Scholars see the content and the influence of perestroika differently. According to one view, it was a genuine democratic movement initiated and implemented by that part of the Soviet elite that opposed authoritarianism and criticized the inefficiency of the Soviet system. According to a second interpretation, perestroika was about the domestic struggle for power, within which one side used the democratization card. In a third interpretation, it was an attempt to reform the inefficient Soviet ...