Double face Perestroika: From Reforms to Collapse

The collapse of the Soviet Union happened suddenly and unexpectedly without alarming warnings beforehand. Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika followed typical evolution of revolutionary development. Perestroika was started with cautious reforms which escalated political processes to radicalization of the political demands and reforms and continued through revolutionary upheaval to Thermidorian counter reaction designed to restoration of order and societal stability. My claim is that Perestroika was neither planned nor controlled process aimed at to democratization, western social democratic type of society and market economy as several contemporary politicians and Gorbachev himself have claimed retrospectively. Nor the fall of the Soviet Union was a result of destructive economic crisis which it couldn’t manage any more. Instead of all of these explanations it was a series of poorly prepared and informed reforms aiming at to correct certain acute societal and economic problems. As often in history its result was both intended and many times unintended results. This drove the society to worsening spiral of economic and political development causing growing unrest among the nomenklatura and in particular in Soviet Republics. That in turn produced again a new stress for immediate and often inconsistently realized corrections of unintended results. Essentially the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a result of top down reforms which ended up the change of the whole social system carried out by the part of the Soviet elite using the impetus of radicalization of upper classes of the society and nationalistic tones of the Soviet republics.