РефератыИностранный языкPePerestroika Essay Research Paper Emergence of the

Perestroika Essay Research Paper Emergence of the

Perestroika Essay, Research Paper


Emergence of the Modern World


Gorbachev and Perestroika


In 1985, Soviet leader and Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S.


Gorbachev announced perhaps the most far-reaching plan for his country’s


economic restructuring. This plan, called “Perestroika”, was a set of


strategies aimed at resolving the gap in scientific and technological


development with the West by initiating economic reform in the Soviet


Union. The meaning of Perestroika was best defined by the Party Plenum


of January 1987:


“Perestroika is the decisive defeat of the processes of stagnation, the


destruction of the braking mechanism, the creation of a reliable


and effective mechanism for increasing the pace of the social-economic


development of society. The main idea of our strategy is to unite the


achievements of the scientific-technical revolution with a planned


economy and to bring into action the entire potential of socialism.”


What this means is that Perestroika was an effort to keep up with the


Western world by initiating what was to them drastic economic reform.


They tried to implement basic capitalist structures and means of


production. However, it couldn’t reconcile itself with the power


structures of Soviet Communism.


The whole idea of Communism is all people are equal and all needs are


taken care of. It did not work that way. Under Soviet Communism, all


are poor, and there are a privileged and rich few that call the shots


and keep the opposition under its thumb. The economy was failing and


people were unhappy.


Peres

troika would try to change that. According to Gorbachev in his 1987


book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, “In the


past 15 years, the [Soviet] economy had declined by more than


one-half…and had fallen to a level close to economic stagnation.”


There were two main reasons why the Soviet economy was doing so poorly.


First, there was the chronic overspending on the military-over 18


percent of the GNP by 1980! This was partially due to the Cold War’s


arms escalations, but also to quell any potential opposition. Second,


the Soviets could not keep up with the widening technological gap with


the West, due to the fact that they never did adopt modern production


strategies.


These strategies, known as Toyotism, provides for a profit oriented


economy where things are only produced when they are needed and there


was to be no stock reserves. It is a production system dictated by


demand. It went against the basic tenets of the Soviet political


economy, which involved mass stockpiling of such things as arms to


protect against potential enemies. It failed, not surprisingly, because


you can’t completely change the main tenets of the old system and yet


try to keep the skeleton of it still in place.


Traditional Russians today who look back on the ‘good old days’ blame


Gorbachev and Perestroika for his part in the collapse of the Soviet


Union. They think him as sort of a villain who reversed seventy or so


years of hard work and started the dismantling of the


Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian state. But looking back, it was


doomed to fail anyway.

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