Soviet Union: perestroika, democratisation and collapse (1985–1991)

Background

When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary in March 1985, the Soviet Union faced slow growth, a costly war in Afghanistan, an arms race with the United States and a fall in world oil prices in 1985–86 that cut export revenues. Gorbachev began with campaigns for discipline and "acceleration", including an anti-alcohol drive that reduced tax revenue. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986, and the official silence in its first days, convinced him that secrecy itself was a problem. Archie Brown argues that Gorbachev's personal convictions and his control of the general secretaryship were decisive: few others in the leadership would have taken the same path.

How it was governed

The period is a sequence of changes to the configuration of power:

• Glasnost (from 1986). Censorship was relaxed; newspapers and television discussed Stalin's crimes, corruption, environmental damage and the war in Afghanistan; banned books were published; political prisoners, including Sakharov, were released.
• Democratisation (1988–1989). The Nineteenth Party Conference (1988) approved a new legislature. In March 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies offered many voters a choice of candidates, and party officials were defeated in several cities. The Congress's televised debates gave dissidents and reformers a national platform.
• End of the party's monopoly (1990). In March 1990 Article 6 of the Constitution was amended to remove the party's guaranteed leading role, other parties became legal, and the Congress created an executive presidency, to which it elected Gorbachev.
• Republics against the centre. Elections in the union republics in 1990 brought national movements and Boris Yeltsin's reformers to power. The Baltic republics declared independence or sovereignty, and in June 1990 the Russian republic declared its sovereignty; Yeltsin was elected president of Russia by popular vote in June 1991.

Economy

The 1987 Law on the State Enterprise let firms set more of their own output and wages, and the 1988 Law on Cooperatives legalised private small business. Prices remained largely fixed, so higher wages chased the same goods: shortages worsened, the budget deficit grew and was financed by printing money, and inter-republican trade broke down. Chris Miller argues that Gorbachev could not overcome the resistance of powerful interests (the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby and enterprise directors) to the price reform and budget cuts that stabilisation needed; competing programmes, such as the "500 Days" plan of 1990, were drafted and then dropped. Output fell in 1990 and 1991.

Repression and violence

The period was far less violent than earlier Soviet history, but it was not peaceful. Troops killed protesters in Tbilisi in April 1989, in Baku in January 1990 and at the Vilnius television tower in January 1991. Ethnic conflicts broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh and elsewhere. In August 1991 a committee of hard-liners, including the KGB chief, the defence minister and the vice-president, placed Gorbachev under house arrest; the coup collapsed within three days in the face of crowds in Moscow, Yeltsin's defiance and divisions in the army.

Outcomes

In a referendum in March 1991, about three-quarters of those voting in the nine participating republics backed a "renewed federation", but the August coup destroyed the treaty that was meant to implement it. Ukraine voted for independence on 1 December 1991. On 8 December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared at Belovezha that the USSR had ceased to exist; Gorbachev resigned on 25 December. The dissolution was largely peaceful, nuclear weapons stayed under central control, and fifteen states emerged, at the price of a deep economic depression and several wars on the former Soviet periphery.

Debates

• Was the system reformable? One view holds that any opening would have destroyed a regime built on coercion and scarcity; another, associated with Brown, holds that specific choices about sequencing and the union treaty mattered.
• Economy or politics first? Comparisons with China's reform path are frequent, but Vladislav Zubok stresses how Soviet conditions differed: the economy was more industrial and more dependent on subsidies, and the republics had their own institutions and elites.
• Who dissolved the USSR? Zubok emphasises the challenge from Yeltsin's Russia and the leaders of the republics, not only nationalist movements on the periphery.

Lessons for institution design

• Liberalising information before institutions changes the game. Glasnost turned grievances into political movements faster than new institutions could channel them.
• Federal forms can become real. Union republics designed as administrative shells became the containers for independent states once elections gave them legitimacy.
• Partial price reform is unstable. Decentralising wages and enterprise decisions without freeing prices or hardening budgets deepened shortages.

Further reading

• Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (OUP, 1996)
• Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (UNC Press, 2016)
• Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale, 2021)