Gorbachev Comes to Power: Glasnost and Perestroika
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the youngest man ever to hold the post. He had been chosen, among other reasons, because the three previous General Secretaries — Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko — had died in rapid succession, and the Politburo recognised that it needed a leader capable of managing the Soviet Union's deepening crisis. Gorbachev introduced two signature reform programmes: glasnost (openness) — a relaxation of censorship and greater freedom of expression — and perestroika (restructuring) — economic reforms intended to modernise the Soviet command economy and reduce corruption. Gorbachev's intention was to save the Soviet system, not to destroy it. He believed the USSR could be reformed into a more efficient, less repressive version of itself that could compete successfully with the West. What he did not anticipate was that releasing the pressure valves of censorship and political control would not produce a managed reform but a cascade of demands — for genuine democracy, for national independence, for an end to communist rule — that the system could not contain. His decision not to use military force to suppress these demands, unlike his predecessors in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), was the decisive factor that allowed them to succeed. Glasnost, intended as a tool of controlled transparency, became the solvent of Soviet power.
- Year: 1985 CE
- Category: Political
