Pt 1

The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev began to dawn upon Western analysts, Kremlin watchers and politicians (most notably, Margaret Thatcher) in 1984 when Gorbachev was touring the West, visiting countries such as Canada and the UK, having an audience with the prime minister and leaving a particularly good impression. By then, Gorbachev was already in the antechamber of power, being one of the youngest men in the Politburo since decades, having advanced in importance under Soviet leader Andropov, and openly entering the prestigious arena of international diplomacy. It was simply a matter of time before the crown would be placed on Gorbachev's head if he could play the waiting game. In the early years therefore, Western analysts were skeptical of Gorbachev's reformist intentions - seeing him a product of the Soviet system, and thus not fundamentally different from his predecessors.

Still in 1988 for instance, Western studies of the KGB would predict that, as Gorbachev elevated the KGB Chairman to his Politburo, it was a sign of the continued reliance of the Soviet system on coercion and the secret police, despite its reformist rhetoric. ''The Counterintelligence State is not going to liberalize itself out of existence,'' John Dziak concluded confidently, only to watch it happen between 1988 and 1991. For a while then, Gorbachev puzzled both theorists of international relations and historians alike, causing even a brief revival of the ''great men'' vision of history, that it was essentially individuals like Gorbachev who ended the Cold War and transformed the Soviet system in a way no one considered possible before 1989. See for instance Archie Brown's works on Gorbachev and what he calls the ''Gorbachev factor'' or the ''Human factor''.

For international relations scholars, Gorbachev challenged the conventional Realist paradigm, which tended to treat political actors as (at most) rational executioners of fixed, objective, national security interests. Gorbachev's unilateral withdrawal from Eastern Europe undermined such conventional thinking.

Since then varying explanations have been offered to rationalize the developments under Gorbachev. Some tend to present him as the pawn of economic forces that forced him to accept the defeat of the Communist system. This one is particularly popular among those that want to see the collapse of the USSR as the result of economic failure. It is however bordering on teleological history. More recent historiography however has recognized that Gorbachev was a product of the system, but that the system itself was already changing decades before Gorbachev came to power - beneath the surface.

Tied to this view is the revision among historians that the preceding Brezhnev era, known as the ''Era of Stagnation'', has obscured the fact that it was an era during which the Soviet Union changed in important ways and that these developments produced a figure like Gorbachev. Increasingly, historians have been showing that the decade 1975-1985 was a decade of a muted ideological power struggle taking place within the corridors of the Soviet bureaucracy over issues such as international relations, Detente, and economic reform. After the Khrushchev Thaw, the last time a Soviet leader tried to improve Soviet Communism, a generation known as the ''Shestidesiatniki'' began to climb through the ranks of the Party and State organs. The name refers to the decade during which they studied or started their careers - the 1960's. This was a generation that was both inspired by the Khrushchev Thaw, disillusioned with the political trials such as those of Sinyavsky, and rather horrified by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

While only a handful of Soviet intellectuals persisted on publically expressing their criticisms of the system and those cross the line into becoming ''dissidents'', a Western phrase, but in Soviet terms - criminality (Ideological subversives) - most of those who harbored doubts about some actions of the Soviet government remained what some historians have called ''loyal oppositionists'', or even never expressed these attitudes outside their student dorm or private sphere. As such, a 1960's generation of well-educated people entered the academia, research institutes, think tanks, the newspapers, and of course the Party and State apparatus. As the Soviet Union's trade, cultural and political ties with the West expanded after the 1975 Helsinki Agreements, a growing number of these Soviet officials was allowed to travel to the West, where they were further learning that capitalists did not have great fangs and horns.

During these decades, as public talk of reform was no longer tolerated and replaced with an emphasis on ''Real existing Socialism'', policy debate moved to the safe confines of academic institutes, where the ''Instituteniki'' were given more space to philosophize about policy in secret journals. As Mark Sandle wrote, ''Many institutes generated their own in-house journals. Newspapers with editors sympathetic to the publication of more unorthodox ideas, or with contacts among members of the institutes, were another potential outlet. However, the continued existence of prior censorship set clear limits to the ability of institutes to extend the bounds of discussion and thereby contribute to the shaping of policy through shifting the parameters of the debate, developing new concepts and so on.'' (See Mark Sandle, ''A Triumph of Ideological Hairdressing? Intellectual Life in the Brezhnev Era Reconsidered'' in: Brezhnev Reconsidered)

These institutes were very close to power however. They provided policy advice to the State organs, their staffs were members of the Communist Party and in many cases, part of the Central Committee - the ruling body with direct access to the political leadership of the country. On top of that, some Instituteniki were also close advisors to the Soviet leaders themselves. As such, throughout the 1960's, 70's and early 80's, ''a network of young academics and apparatchiks was firmly entrenched within the system,'' who were of ''liberal, reformist opinion.''