RG

IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY

Leninism

FOCUS

Perestroika

BEFORE

1909 Lenin publishes Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which becomes an obligatory subject in all institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union.

1941 Stalin becomes the premier of the Soviet Union, ruling with a strong hand.

AFTER

1991 The USSR is officially dissolved, dividing up into 15 independent sovereign states. This marks the end of the Cold War.

1991–1999 Boris Yeltsin becomes the first president of the Russian Federation and begins to transform the country’s centralized economy into a market economy.

Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, planned reforms designed to boost the stalled Russian economy of the 1980s. Gorbachev argued that this stagnation was a result of an unfair distribution of social wealth, inflexible structures that stopped the masses from using their full creativity, and the overbearing authority of the state.

His program was comprised of two main components. Perestroika (restructuring) involved a rethinking of the principles of democratic centralism, a shift to scientific methods, and the equal implementation of universal principles of social justice. Glasnost (openness) meant increased transparency in social and political spheres, and freedom of speech.

  Gorbachev stated that such democratization did not signal an abandonment of socialism. The true spirit of Lenin, he claimed, did not see socialism as a rigid theoretical scheme, but rather as a constantly changing process. Gorbachev argued that socialism and democracy were in fact indivisible, although his understanding of democracy refers only to the freedom of the working masses to rise to power.

  Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s economic reforms resulted in a deep economic downturn, and his social reforms precipitated the breakup of the Soviet state.

RG

Gorbachev’s democratic agenda included a determination to negotiate an end to the Cold War with US President Ronald Reagan.

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