Russia, Post-Soviet

WHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, he was confronted with a system that had grown top-heavy with an unwieldy party bureaucracy. Since its beginnings under Vladimir I. Lenin in the Russian Revolution, the government had become more of a hindrance than a help in governing the 15 republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), also known as the Soviet Union. Unlike many in the party leadership, Gorbachev had become aware of the oppressive character of the regime. Gorbachev expressed in his memoirs that he realized, as well, that the foment of independence in Eastern Europe would also reach the USSR, and that he had to either be prepared to admit it—albeit in a controlled way—or resist it with the brutality with which Nikita Khrushchev had suppressed the Hungarian revolt in 1956.

In February 1986, Gorbachev initiated a complete leftist overhaul of the Soviet system at the Twenty-Seventh Congress. (Leftist, that is, in the noncommunist sense, as in the liberalization of Soviet society.) Robert G. Kaiser reflected on Gorbachev's dilemma in “The USSR in Decline” in Foreign Affairs, “the rhetoric of Soviet reform emphasizes renewal and progress, but the facts that made reform necessary describe failure—the failure of the Soviet system …. [Gorbachev] speaks of the need to democratize his country to make it work better. Economic reform, he has concluded, is impossible without political reform.”

The Russian term for Gorbachev's anticipated reforms was perestroika, a total “restructuring” of the often repressive system that Josef Stalin had instituted in the 1930s. At the same time, he wanted to create a period of glasnost, not only a liberalization of Soviet society and culture, but an admission of the grave abuses that had happened in the Soviet past. In 1990, as an example of his doctrine, Gorbachev surrendered to Poland's Marshal Wojciech Jaruzelski sensitive files that proved Soviet complicity in the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn and other camps in World War II. The massacres had been designed to remove those whom Stalin saw as any opposition to Soviet control in the eastern part of Poland.

In September 1988, Gorbachev effected a dramatic reorganization of the Party Secretariat, which not only helped run the Communist Party but also the Soviet Union. As Kaiser stressed, Gorbachev “has proposed astounding changes to remove the Communist Party apparat [bureaucracy] from day-to-day administration of the economy and society, to replace it with new, elected bodies.”

Yet, Gorbachev's main battle was still to be fought in the Soviet Union. He launched a gamble that harkened back to the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917 that brought the communists (then Bolsheviks) to power. At the July 1988 Party Congress, Gorbachev unveiled a plan to bring back the soviets. However, by attempting to marginalize the Party Central Committee and bureaucracy, he was also undermining the government that kept the Soviet Union together. In 1989, he attempted to open a Congress of People's Deputies, another step away from the centralism of the old Soviet Union. As the Library of Congress Country Study on Soviet Russia states, “In 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies stood at the apex of the system of soviets and was the highest legislative organ in the country. Created by amendment to the Constitution in December 1988, the Congress of People's Deputies theoretically represented the united authority of the congresses and soviets in the republics. In addition to its broad duties, it created and monitored all other government bodies having the authority to issue decrees.”

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