Intro

It is important not to divorce too completely the concepts of glasnost and perestroika when discussing Gorbachev’s intent. The truth is both of these terms were rather vague political slogans designed to get people on-board, no different than “Yes We Can!” or “Make America Great Again”; there was an agenda behind the words, but the words were there to generate support more than anything else.

Treating glasnost and perestroika as one agenda or two very close, complementary agendas, we can then try to analyze what Gorbachev’s general reformation and restructuring agenda entailed. Because that is what they were; perestroika means “restructuring” and glasnost means “publicity”. Glasnost had been a popular campaign in the Russian Empire nearly 100 years before Gorbachev’s adoption of the phrase and he adopted it, more than anything else, to aid his perestroika.

As you’ve been reading New Thinking, I doubt any of what I’ve said thus far is really new to you, but it will hopefully keep the total reform concept together as one movement in your mind as we analyze Gorbachev’s goals. While the reformations were often divided by separate words, especially when Gorbachev needed a measure to get more support, these reformations were one objective in Gorbachev’s mind. To really understand the intent behind all these reforms, we need to explore a little about Gorbachev himself.

Gorbachev

A neat little fact about Gorbachev is that he was the only General Secretary of the CCCP to have been born and grown up entirely in the Soviet Union. He grew up on a collective farm, he grew up seeing people starve losing several family members to the ’32-’35 famine. In Stalin’s purges, both of Gorbachev’s grandfathers fell victim to the Gulag machine. He had heard the tales of torture. After the war, Gorbachev’s family was awarded medals for producing so much food, an achievement that had costed Gorbachev’s family 20+ hour workdays.

After Gorbachev went to University and joined the Party one of his assignments was to work at a polling location to help ensure 100% voter turnout. Gorbachev specifically noted that many voted out of fear. Later, during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns, Gorbachev defended a Jewish student that had been accused of treachery.

By now you may be noticing a pattern in Gorbachev’s life. That he was frequently bumping into the horrifying reality of the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s death, Gorbachev was one of the loudest anti-Stalinist reformers. His political work was focused on improving the lives of the people. He saw Stalin’s Soviet Union as a perversion of Leninism that needed repaired. But even after Stalin, the Union didn’t get much better. Throughout the 70s, Gorbachev was often at odds with reigning Soviet policy; the invasion of Afghanistan, the failing agricultural management system that he said was too centralized, and from 1979-1981 all of the agriculture in the Soviet Union suffered. Keep in mind, agriculture was Gorbachev’s bread and butter; he grew up with it and knew it well. The weakness of Soviet agriculture would bother him to the end.

We’ve covered enough of Gorbachev’s upbringing to establish the point: He was not a Soviet Hardliner. He was not a Stalinist. He was a Marxist, closer to a modern Marxist-Social Democrat than a Leninist-Marxist or Stalinist-Marxist; certainly no Maoist. Indeed, some would consider Gorbachev a heretic and Gorbachev himself did not seem to approve of doctrinal ideology at all. In fact, I would personally call him a Pragmatist-Marxist. Policies like Stalin and Mao’s agricultural reforms that starved millions to death would have never been approved by Gorbachev. And those were only some examples of policies he’d disagree with.

The Reforms

So what were the glasnost and perestroika reforms he thought would fix the mess then? How on Earth did he think it would fix it?

By 1984, the Soviet agricultural sector, low productivity, and second-rate goods were becoming undeniable problems. People were already beginning to predict a collapse of the Soviet Union from economic weakness. The first reform, which Gorbachev categorized under perestroika was “acceleration”. The idea here was to put some stilts under the planned economy and speed up (or cut down red tape, depending on your perspective) market production. He did not want to create a market economy, but believed if he sped up and freed up enough of the market then the State-owned companies would eventually become agents of their own, making decisions that moved the economy and the market. I think the intent was in the hope of establishing state-owned companies with global market mover power, similar to China’s, such as Huawei. (I’ll say China has accomplished this much better than Gorbachev could have hoped for.) That was the intent; obviously, it failed pretty miserably.

Another major reform was aimed at his beloved agriculture sector. He tied farmer salaries to production and allowed them to sell some of their produce directly to markets and cut out the state as the middle man. Now, this seems rather counter-intuitive to a Marxist ideology, so my assessment of this objective is based on what I know of his upbringing. Gorbachev had worked 20+ hour days before and all his family got for it was some time in the Gulag, starvation, and a shiny ribbon. I think this solution to slow economy and poor agricultural output was based on his on-the-ground experience: people will not work themselves to death without benefit to be gained and if you cut the state out of the middle it will speed up how quickly food gets to the market. The intent here was fairly clear, but what it did most was weaken the Union’s grasp on everything. Next he began an idea of introducing limited private enterprise to the Union. Personally, I assess this as a Soviet mirror to contemporary Deng Xiaoping’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” model (which China still operates on a model of). The idea summarizing Deng’s model is this: Communism within, Capitalism without. Why not take money and reap profit from other countries and then distribute it equally within our own country? Once more, this plan failed for Gorbachev, but it was right in principle because China is doing it quite well.

Why did all of these solutions fail? Why did the Union collapse? Why did none of what Gorbachev wanted to achieve actually happen? The answer to those questions are the reason Gorbachev would sometimes lean on glasnost as his campaign buzzword. Some were distrustful of the Party’s efforts. For example, some people believed the market-agent idea was being deliberately undermined and these reforms were just lip-service. Others in the Party saw these efforts as Capitalist or too radical. The fact is there were too many problems, too many changes, and not enough consensus anywhere. This is where Gorbachev leaned on glasnost.

His idea behind the phrase, rather than perestroika was that if enough people could see exactly how bad of a state the Union actually was in, they might embrace his reforms better. He was both correct and had dramatically miscalculated. His approval among the people rose every time he appealed to glasnost, but the Party became deeply distrustful of him. For starters, to allow for glasnost to assist his perestroika agenda, the people needed to be made aware of the state’s problems. The only way to do that was to un-censor much of what had always been censored: press, speech, past Soviet records, the depth of problems. This openness is very anti-Marxist and is something everything from the Communist Manifesto to hardline Party politicians in 1986 would warn brings the downfall of Communism. And they would be right, as we now know.

A dramatic point for Gorbachev would be Chernobyl. Gorbachev has originally been misled about the scale of the disaster and it had blown up on the world stage (no pun intended). The whole incident embodied what Gorbachev had seen as the problems of the USSR: incompetence, shoddy production and workmanship, laziness, technical deficiency, political cover ups, everything. From Chernobyl on there is a distinct increase in Gorbachev’s public vocalization of disapproval of Soviet policy. In my opinion, from this point on, Gorbachev’s agenda was about fixing everything at once and that it ultimately alienated the Party entirely.

Conclusion and Summary

I hope by now we’ve covered enough examples and context to answer this question in a summary form: Gorbachev had grown up and experienced so many flaws in the Soviet system that by 1987 he had lost all patience with it. His perestroika reforms were going to happen, in full, and glasnost was going to be the phrase and agenda he would use to generate the public support for the rest. The reforms were essentially aimed at undoing what he perceived as faults in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Marxist ideologies and moving the Soviet Union back toward a Social Democracy or Pragmatically Marxist ideology. I also personally believe he was borrowing from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms that had begun less than a decade before.

Suggested Reading on Gorbachev:

Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman. (The primary source of my knowledge of Gorbachev.)

Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson.

Gorbachev by Martin McCauley.