By relations between Russian leaders especially with Mr Gorbachev as Soviet President but also with Boris Yeltsin as President of the Russian republic and their Western counterparts were warm and trusting. The failure of East and West to build on the new foundations is a tragedy of major proportions. Image source, Reuters. A new policy of glasnost transparency quite rapidly developed into freedom of speech. Hitherto banned books that challenged not only official history but also the legitimacy of Communist rule were published in large editions.
Dissidents were released from prison and past distortions of justice were investigated. Persecution of the Churches ceased and gave way to religious tolerance. Contested elections in which votes were counted honestly were introduced in The official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was increasingly discarded and replaced by ideological pluralism and free intellectual inquiry. Freedom of communication including an end to jamming of foreign broadcasts and liberty to travel to Western countries were introduced.
So-called "democratic centralism" within the Communist Party - a euphemism for a hierarchical, strictly-disciplined party, intolerant of dissent - was quietly abandoned. The party of almost 20 million members became an openly argumentative body with the clash of ideas out in the open. Communist Party members stood against one another on radically different political platforms in the elections of , and Constitutional change in early legalised the creation of oppositional political parties and legitimised the already existing new political pluralism.
He also tried to make the Soviet bureaucracy more efficient. Gorbachev soon came to believe that fixing the Soviet economy would be nearly impossible without also reforming the political and social structure of the Communist nation.
Gromyko had served at his post for 28 years and was considered a member of the old Soviet guard. The purpose of reform was to prop up the centrally planned economy—not to transition to market socialism.
Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism. The law stipulated that state enterprises were free to determine output levels based on demand from consumers and other enterprises.
Enterprises had to fulfill state orders, but could dispose of the remaining output as they saw fit. However, the state still held control over the means of production for these enterprises, limiting their ability to enact full-cost accountability.
Enterprises bought input from suppliers at negotiated contract prices. Under the law, enterprises became self-financing; that is, they had to cover expenses wages, taxes, supplies, and debt service through revenues. No longer was the government to rescue unprofitable enterprises that faced bankruptcy.
The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May , was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms introduced in the early part of the Gorbachev era. Many of these new co-ops became the basis of the oligarchical system that continues to control power in Russia today.
Gorbachev also peeled back restrictions on foreign trade, streamlining processes to allow manufacturers and local government agencies to bypass the previously stifling bureaucratic system of the central government.
He encouraged Western investment, although he later reversed his original policy, which called for these new business ventures to be majority Russian-owned and operated. He also showed initial restraint when laborers began to push for increased protections and rights, with thousands protesting the wild inefficiencies of the Soviet coal industry.
But he again reversed course when faced with pressure from hardliners after a massive strike by , miners in While Gorbachev had instituted these reforms to jumpstart the sluggish Soviet economy, many of them had the opposite effect. The agricultural sector, for example, had provided food at low cost thanks to decades of heavy government subsidies. Now, it could charge higher prices in the marketplace — prices many Soviets could not afford.
Government spending and Soviet debt skyrocketed, and pushes by workers for higher wages led to dangerous inflation. If Gorbachev faced opposition from the entrenched hardliners that he was moving too far, too fast, he was criticized for doing just the opposite by others.
Some liberals called for full-fledged abolishment of central planning committees entirely, which Gorbachev resisted. As reforms under glasnost revealed both the horrors of the Soviet past, and its present-day inefficiencies, Gorbachev moved to remake much of the political system of the U. At a Party meeting in , he pushed through measures calling for the first truly democratic elections since the Russian Revolution of Hardliners who supported this initially believed that the date for these elections would be far enough in the future that they could control the process.
Instead, Gorbachev announced that they would be held just months later. While some Communist Party members reserved many of the seats for themselves, other hardliners went down to defeat at the ballot box to liberal reformers. Former dissidents and prisoners, including Nobel laureate physicist and activist Andrei Sakharov , were elected as candidates waged Western-style campaigns. When the new Congress met for its first session in May , newspapers, television and radio stations — newly empowered by the lifting of press restrictions under glasnost — devoted hours of time to the meetings, which featured open conflict between conservatives and liberals.
But as with economic reforms, many of these newly-elected reformers used their platforms to criticize what they still considered limited change. And the pushback by hardliners was just as fierce. In March , the largest newspaper in the Soviet Union published a full-throttled attack on Gorbachev by chemist and social critic Nina Andreyeva. Gorbachev held firm on a promise to end Soviet involvement in a war in Afghanistan , which the U. After 10 controversial years and nearly 15, Soviet deaths, troops fully withdrew in It was with the staunchly anti-Communist Reagan that Gorbachev, a new kind of Communist leader, achieved a series of landmark agreements, including the INF Treaty that eliminated all intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
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