The Gorbachev Moment – and Why It Was So Brief

Abstract

The essay describes the anti-Stalinist tradition as a source of reformist thinking in the USSR and the policies of Nikita Khrushchev as precedents for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. It identifies promoters of reform within the Communist Party, among dissidents, and among their foreign supporters. It claims that those who supported Gorbachev were fewer and less influential than it appeared at the time, and that their ideas for economic reform were less developed and coherent than those for democratization and foreign policy. The essay describes the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s advocated by Nikolai Bukharin as an example of what at the time seemed to serve as a precedent for Gorbachev’s reforms, but had little actual impact. The essay discusses how opponents of Gorbachev’s reforms at home and abroad sought to undermine his initiatives. It considers the role of the United States in bringing the Gorbachev Moment to an end, by highlighting US rejection of Gorbachev’s vision of a nuclear-free, demilitarized world; insistence on promoting “shock therapy” for the Russian economy and support for Boris Yeltsin’s antidemocratic means of doing so; and policies that undermined democratic opposition to Yeltsin, even as his brutal war against Chechnya helped set a precedent for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.