Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy – a flawed reformer on an impossible mission

Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy – a flawed reformer on an impossible mission

Subject: IR

Section: International Organisation

• Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday, had set out to revitalize the moribund Communist system and shape a new union based on a more equal partnership between the 15 republics, of which the two most powerful were Russia and Ukraine. Yet in the space of six years, both Communism and the Union came crashing down.
• He attempted political and economic reforms simultaneously and on too ambitious a scale, unleashing forces he could not control. It was a lesson not lost on China’s leaders, who embraced the market economy but served notice with the 1989 killings of protesters on Tiananmen Square that they would act ruthlessly to defend the Communist Party’s grip on power.

He introduced two reforms Perestroika and Glasnost

Perestroika

Perestroika, which in English translates to “restructuring,” was Gorbachev’s program to restructure the Soviet economy in an attempt to revitalize it.

To restructure, Gorbachev decentralized the controls over the economy, effectively lessening the government’s role in the decision-making processes of individual enterprises. Perestroika also hoped to improve production levels by bettering the lives of workers, including giving them more recreation time and safer working conditions.

The overall perception of work in the Soviet Union was to be changed from corruption to honesty, from slacking to hard work. Individual workers, it was hoped, would take a personal interest in their work and would be rewarded for helping to better production levels.

Glasnost

Glasnost has several general and specific meanings – a policy of maximum openness in the activities of state institutions and freedom of information, the inadmissibility of hushing up problems, and so on. It has been used in Russian to mean “openness and transparency” since at least the end of the 18th century.

Baltic republics

• Baltic states, the northeastern region of Europe, includes the countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea.
• In 1991, their then popularly elected governments declared independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with overwhelming support.