Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985–91

On 11 March 1985 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union elected Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev as General Secretary. He was 54 years old — the youngest leader of the Soviet Union since Stalin — and the first General Secretary whose formative political experience had been the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 rather than the revolutions, civil war or Great Patriotic War. Six years and nine months later, on 25 December 1991, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced by the tricolour of the Russian Federation. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the most consequential political event of the late twentieth century, and Gorbachev's reforms — glasnost, perestroika, demokratizatsiya — were central to it. Whether the reforms caused the collapse, merely precipitated an already irreversible decline, or represented an intended transformation that escaped their author's control is the central interpretive question of the period. This lesson examines Gorbachev's reforms, the revolutions of 1989, the internal Soviet crisis of 1990–91, the August Coup, the dissolution of the USSR, and the historiographical debate over causation.

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Reform Foundations: Glasnost, Perestroika, Demokratizatsiya

Gorbachev's initial programme, presented at the April 1985 Central Committee plenum, was framed as uskorenie — acceleration of economic growth through improved discipline, technological investment, and modest reforms to the planning system. It resembled the Andropov approach of 1982–83, writ larger. Within eighteen months, confronted with the limits of administrative reform and radicalised by the disaster of Chernobyl (26 April 1986, whose initial handling the Soviet state managed through days of silence and evasion), Gorbachev had moved to a more fundamental programme.

• Glasnost ("openness", "transparency") meant, initially, the reduction of censorship of the press and of historical examination; by 1987–88 it had become a general lifting of the taboos surrounding Stalin, the Terror, the famine of 1932–33, the Katyn massacre, the Molotov-Ribbentrop secret protocols, and the conduct of the Afghan war. The journal Ogonyok and the newspapers Moscow News, Argumenty i Fakty and Izvestia became vehicles of sustained public reassessment. Between 1986 and 1989 the Soviet press moved from heavy self-censorship to a public sphere that published, among other materials, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1989) and the full text of the Secret Speech (1989).
• Perestroika ("restructuring") was Gorbachev's term for economic reform. The Law on State Enterprises (1987) allowed enterprises to retain profits after plan fulfilment, to elect managers and to negotiate some supply contracts; the Law on Cooperatives (May 1988) legalised small private and collective businesses. Private plots in agriculture were enlarged and leases to individual farmers were encouraged. The package combined elements of Kosygin's 1965 reforms with modest market mechanisms, but it was neither a thorough plan nor a coherent market reform; the transitional economy that resulted — neither planned nor market — produced declining output, shortages, and a rapidly expanding black economy.
• Demokratizatsiya ("democratisation") was formalised at the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. A new Congress of People's Deputies was created, with competitive (though not fully free) elections held in March 1989: 2,250 deputies included 1,500 elected from territorial and national constituencies and 750 from official organisations. The televised sessions of the Congress — the first genuine political debate in Soviet history — politicised the urban population across the USSR. Andrei Sakharov, returned from internal exile in December 1986, was elected to the Congress and became, until his death in December 1989, the moral centre of the reformist opposition.

Reform	Year	Content
Uskorenie	1985–86	Economic acceleration, labour discipline
Glasnost (gradual)	1986–89	Lifting of censorship; reassessment of Stalinism
Law on State Enterprises	1987	Enterprise profit retention, elected managers
Law on Cooperatives	May 1988	Legal small businesses
Nineteenth Party Conference	June 1988	Demokratizatsiya adopted
Congress of People's Deputies	March 1989	Partially competitive elections
Article 6 repealed	Feb/March 1990	CPSU's constitutional monopoly ended
Presidency of USSR	March 1990	Gorbachev elected president by Congress

The February–March 1990 repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which had guaranteed the "leading role" of the Communist Party, was the single most consequential reform. It created the formal space for multi-party politics. It also removed the institutional structure through which Gorbachev had exercised his leadership: the Party ceased to be the backbone of the Soviet state, but no alternative backbone had been built.

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Foreign Policy: The "New Thinking" and the End of the Cold War

Gorbachev's foreign policy transformation — conducted primarily with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze from July 1985 — was the most dramatic and successful element of the reform programme. The "new political thinking" rejected the doctrines of class conflict and military competition that had structured Soviet foreign policy since 1917, accepted the integrated interdependence of the nuclear age, and deliberately reduced the external pressures on the Soviet system.

• Reykjavik Summit (October 1986): Gorbachev and Reagan came close to agreement on the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons before negotiations collapsed over strategic defence.
• INF Treaty (8 December 1987): the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in Washington, eliminated an entire class of weapons — the Soviet SS-20s and US Pershing II / Gryphon cruise missiles deployed in Europe. It was the first treaty ever to produce an absolute numerical reduction in nuclear arsenals.
• Afghanistan withdrawal (May 1988 – February 1989): the Geneva Accords of April 1988 provided the political framework; the last Soviet units crossed the Amu Darya on 15 February 1989.
• UN speech (7 December 1988): Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet force reduction of 500,000 troops and the withdrawal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe.
• "Sinatra Doctrine" (October 1989, Gennadi Gerasimov's phrase): replacing the Brezhnev Doctrine, it signalled that Eastern European states would be allowed to manage their own affairs.
• CFE Treaty (November 1990): Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, equalising NATO and Warsaw Pact force ceilings.
• START I (31 July 1991): strategic arms reduction treaty signed in Moscow.

The Soviet signal to Eastern European leaders that force would not be used to preserve communist governments transformed the political calculations of those regimes. Gorbachev's foreign-policy reform permitted the revolutions of 1989; it did not cause them, but without the withdrawal of the Soviet security guarantee they could not have occurred.

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The Revolutions of 1989

The Communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed, with one exception, in the second half of 1989 — seven regimes within seven months, in a sequence whose rapidity astonished all observers. Gorbachev's explicit message to the Polish, Hungarian and East German leaderships during 1988–89 was that no Soviet military intervention would support an unpopular regime.

• Poland. The 1988 wave of strikes had produced round-table talks between the Communist government and the Solidarity movement (February–April 1989). Partially free elections on 4 June 1989 (the day of Tiananmen) returned Solidarity in every contested seat. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity intellectual, became the first non-communist prime minister in the Eastern bloc in August 1989.
• Hungary. The Hungarian Communist Party accepted pluralism in February 1989 and reopened the question of the 1956 Revolution. On 2 May 1989 Hungary began dismantling the border fence with Austria; on 10 September the border was formally opened. The opening produced a flood of East German holidaymakers exiting to the West via Hungary — the proximate cause of the East German collapse.
• East Germany. Mass emigration through the Hungarian and Czechoslovak borders during September–October 1989 coincided with the Leipzig Monday demonstrations of October. Erich Honecker was removed as SED General Secretary on 18 October; his successor Egon Krenz, confronted with continuing demonstrations, authorised a revised travel law that was bungled at press conference on 9 November 1989. Berliners converged on the checkpoints and the Berlin Wall fell that night.
• Czechoslovakia. A student demonstration in Prague on 17 November 1989 was suppressed with sufficient force to trigger general protest. The Velvet Revolution unfolded within ten days: a general strike on 27 November produced the resignation of the Communist leadership; on 29 December 1989 Václav Havel, the Charter 77 playwright and prisoner of conscience, was elected President by the Federal Assembly.
• Bulgaria. Todor Zhivkov, in power since 1954, was removed on 10 November 1989 in an internal Party coup; constitutional reform and multi-party elections followed in 1990.
• Romania. The single violent revolution of 1989. The Ceaușescu regime, the most repressive in the bloc, attempted to suppress demonstrations in Timișoara in December; the demonstrations spread to Bucharest; on 22 December the Ceaușescus fled the capital, were arrested, tried before an ad hoc tribunal, and executed by firing squad on 25 December 1989.

German reunification followed directly. The Two Plus Four talks between the two Germanies and the four wartime Allies produced the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (September 1990); unification took effect on 3 October 1990. Gorbachev's acceptance of a reunified Germany's membership in NATO (in the Caucasus meetings of July 1990) remains one of the most-debated concessions of the period.

flowchart TD
  A[Gorbachev GenSec<br/>11 March 1985] --> B[Glasnost<br/>from 1986]
  A --> C[Perestroika<br/>from 1987]
  A --> D[Demokratizatsiya<br/>1988-89]
  A --> E[New Thinking<br/>INF 1987]
  E --> F[Afghanistan withdrawal<br/>15 Feb 1989]
  E --> G[Sinatra Doctrine<br/>1989]
  G --> H[Poland June 1989<br/>Solidarity]
  G --> I[Hungary May 1989<br/>Border opened]
  I --> J[East Germany<br/>Wall falls 9 Nov 1989]
  G --> K[Czechoslovakia Nov 1989<br/>Velvet Revolution]
  G --> L[Romania Dec 1989<br/>Ceausescu executed]
  J --> M[German reunification<br/>3 Oct 1990]
  D --> N[Baltic independence<br/>March 1990]
  N --> O[Russia sovereignty<br/>12 June 1990<br/>Yeltsin]
  O --> P[August Coup<br/>19-21 Aug 1991]
  P --> Q[Republics declare independence]
  Q --> R[Belavezha Accords<br/>8 Dec 1991]
  R --> S[USSR dissolved<br/>25 Dec 1991]

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Internal Crisis: Nationalism, Economy, the Rise of Yeltsin

The external empire collapsed more rapidly than the internal empire, but the internal crisis developed through the same period with comparable momentum.