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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.
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.
| 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| Article 6 repealed | Feb/March 1990 | CPSU's constitutional monopoly ended |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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
The external empire collapsed more rapidly than the internal empire, but the internal crisis developed through the same period with comparable momentum.
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