Did Gorbachev fail, or end the Soviet system without war?

The short answer

• A generational change at the top. Three general secretaries died in office between November 1982 and March 1985. Their deaths opened the leadership to a younger man whose career had taken him through regional party work in Stavropol and agriculture. Gorbachev and allies including Alexander Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze had seen the West and believed Soviet renewal was possible. The decline described in chapter 7 created the demand for change; the passing of the old guard gave them an opportunity to attempt it.
• Falling oil prices and the vodka campaign emptied the budget. The government depended on alcohol taxes at home and oil and gas sales abroad, its two largest sources of income apart from enterprise profits. Gorbachev’s temperance campaign reduced the first, and falling world oil prices in 1985–86 cut the second. Afghanistan, the Chernobyl clean-up and an investment drive still required funding. Printing money covered the immediate gap but added to the excess of cash over goods that undermined later reforms.
• Chernobyl discredited secrecy. At Chernobyl, failures and concealment extended from plant managers to ministries in Moscow. The accident persuaded Gorbachev that hidden problems could not be fixed and gave reformers a reason to challenge censorship. Glasnost helped him expose opponents of reform, but citizens used the same opening to criticise the party itself. The discussion soon went beyond his control.
• The apparatus resisted economic reform. Ministries and regional party bosses had built careers within the plan and controlled resources through it. They diluted measures that threatened that control. By 1988 Gorbachev believed political competition was needed to overcome them. At the 19th Party Conference in June–July 1988, contested elections to a new parliament were approved. Reform would now be fought over at the voting booth as well as inside party offices.

What it changed

An elected opposition gained a national stage. The new Congress gave opponents a national platform. Yeltsin, Sakharov and several hundred allies formed the Inter-Regional Group of deputies, the first organised opposition since the 1920s. In March 1990 the Congress removed the constitutional article guaranteeing the party’s leading role. That spring, elections to republic parliaments brought nationalist and democratic movements to power in the Baltic states, Russia and elsewhere.

Shortages turned into a crisis of supply. Basic goods were no longer reliably delivered by the state in 1989–90. Rationing spread, while regions and republics kept food and raw materials for themselves. Perestroika left its successors with empty shops and a monetary overhang: too much unspent money relative to available goods. That was the starting point for price liberalisation in January 1992.

National movements found their voice. Glasnost opened space for national grievances as well as criticism of the party. In February 1988 the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hatched on the map, voted to leave Azerbaijan. That year popular fronts formed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. A reform begun at the centre was enabling demands to escape its authority.