Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with an obvious but also vague mandate for reform. It was clear that things needed to change, but it was not at all clear the direction that reform was to take. There was no historical model for the situation Gorbachev was facing. Since the Revolution, the Soviet system had been through 3 major phases: the total reconstruction of society under Lenin, the total subordination of society by Stalin, and the total stagnation of society under the corrupt regime of Breshnev. To reform the existing system, it would be necessary to attack all three layers, but gradually.
The greatest priority facing Gorbachev was economic revival. But given the totalitarian nature of the Soviet system, reviving the economy would require a complete restructuring of Soviet life. The term perestroika (which literally means rebuilding) appeared in April 1985 and soon after became the new mantra for the new era, designating a revolutionary transformation of all institutions, and evenually peoples' inner beings.
It is difficult to know exactly what Gorbachev intended when he introduced the concept of perestroika and its subsequent policies, but in the core area of economics, Gorbachev's main goals were a variation on Khruschev's program of Reform Communism. He intended to decentralize the Plan, introduce material incentives to workers and managers, and introduce an approximation of real prices. He also intended to create a small private, or "cooperative" sector in consumer goods and services. There was however, never any question of creating a real market under perestroika, not even to the extent that one had exited under the NEP. Gorbachev's economic program, though radical in the Soviet context, was hardly revolutionary. If a revolution were to emerge from perestroika, it would have to come from the political reforms that accompanied the economic ones.
Glasnost
Gorbachev introduced the policy of glasnost in 1986. The term, which literally means "openness" or "publicity," was coined in part to generate to mobilize greater support for perestroika, but it soon took on a life of its own. The great subject of glasnost became what Gorbachev called the "blank spots" of Soviet history (or Stalinism). 1987 was marked by two events which, for the first time in nearly 25 years, reopened the Stalin question. The first was the wide release of a film called "Repentance," made by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze. The film gave a hideously surreal yet brutally realistic protrayal of the Stalin era. The second event was the publication of a novel by Rybakov, "Children of the Arbat," which offered a personal portait of Stalin.
When Gorbachev introduced glasnost, his hope was to undermine the credibility of the Party old guard and to stimulate the sluggish Party with the sting of criticism. However, glasnost also opened the question of the legitimacy of the regime, indeed the entire revolution, itself. It becomes easy to see how glasnost could (and eventually did) turn into a denunciation of the system itself. Gorbachev and his liberal advisors, apparently thought that they could safely walk the line between criticism and demolition. Glasnost also provided a context for a new political rivalry that, at its core, was a fundamental disagreement over of the direction the Soviet system would take. At the level of the Politburo and the Secretariat, there emerged a left of Shevardnadze, Yakovlev, and Yeltsin; a Right around Ligachev (number two of the regime) who spoke for the Party apparat; and a center around Ryzhkov, who represented the government apparat and was associated with the military-industrial complex. In this alignment, Gorbachev was closest to the Left, but he was compelled to accommodate the other groups as well. Sometime during the course of the glasnost campaign in 1986, Gorbachev discovered that his intended instrument of reform, the Party, was in fact the principal cause of the trouble he wished to correct. He also discovered that he had overestimated his power as General Secretary. Gorbachev embarked on perestroika with the activism of the early Khruschev years, seemingly forgetting that the intervening 20 years had produced the incrusted monster of the nomenklatura Party, who were unresponsive to commands from the top. So for the first 2 years, Gorbachev issued commands and replaced countless personnel, yet nothing changed. When glasnost still did not topple the old Party appart, Gorbachev introduced a third component of perestroika: contested elections and eventually, democratization. This campaign further alienated the Right, who were getting very uncomfortable with the degree to which Gorbachev had broken from Soviet tradition. Faced with this, Gorbachev adopted the tactic he would henceforth employ regularly: tacking between Left and Right: depending on their strength at any given moment and thereby constantly occupying the middle ground. The seesaw continued through the spring of 1988, until Ligachev and the conservatives attempted a coup of sorts. They arranged for the publication of a letter in Sovietskaya Rossiya by a Leningrad chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva titled "I Cannot Compromise My Principles." The letter attacked perestroika as foreign and subversive, and with anti-semitic overtones it defended the old ways as both Leninist and national (Andreyeva later told Remnick that she considered herself a Stalinist.) It is not clear how far Ligachev intended to go with the Andreyeva affair (he still denies playing any role in the letter's publication), but he could very possibly have been out to unseat Gorbachev. At the very least, he was seeking to influence the upcoming elections for the Party Conference (which did result in a huge victory for the conservatives, despite the publication of Gorbachev and Yakovlev's official refutation of Nina Andreyeva's positions).
By the end of 1988, the fruits of glasnost were beginning to bloom. Such forbidden classics as Doctor Zhivago at last appeared legally, as did the works of émigré writers such as Vladimir Nabokov. Vasilii Grossman's "Life and Fate," which presented Stalin and Hitler as kindred figures also saw the light of day. The purge trials of the 1930s were officially declared to fraudulent, and all of the opposition figures of the time (with the exception of Trotsky) were rehabilitated. Some of Bukharin's works were reprinted, and Steven Cohen's biography of Bukharin and Robert Conquest's "Great Terror" appeared in translation for the first time. By the eve of 1989, the whole of Soviet history from War Communism to Breshnev had been opened up for reevaluation. For the time, however, Lenin remained untouchable. Nor was the fundamental theoretical soundness of the socialist order to be questioned (despite the apparent merits of the market that were making themselves known.)
What had begun as a process of filling in the "blank spots" of the Stalin era had led to a flood of candor in which the very foundations of Soviet society were discredited. Malia writes that "in two years a whiff of glasnost had demolished the ideological work of seven decades."
The Revolt of the Nationalities
Gorbachev's perestroika had taken on a life of its own, its fire flamed by the air of glasnost. By the end of 1988, the situation among the minority nationalities of the USSR had become explosive.
The federal character of the USSR was camouflaged by the institutionalization of nationality (which was defined in ethnic and linguistic terms) on a territorial basis. Each constitutent republic except Russia received its own political and cultural institutions staffed predominantly by native elites under the close supervision of the Party. Recall that the purpose of this "nationalist in form, but socialist in content" policy was to both appease local nationalism and co-opt it for the purposes of building socialism.
Stagnation under Breshnev had undermined the republics just as it had eaten away at Russia. Ecological depredation caused by Soviet industrialization was seen by the populations of the republics as the evil fruit of domination by the center. Chernobyl, in particular, accelerated the development of Ukrainian and Belorussian seperatist movements. The consequence of this laundry list of grievances were a series of demands for local control as the only appropriate "restructuring" for the national republics. And glasnost made it possible to talk about all of this without the fear of reprimand.