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Abstract
The article deals with the evolution of Gorbachev’s thinking on the national question during perestroika, providing additional empirical proof to the existing literature on the subject. It looks at why Gorbachev did not consider the national question a priority initially and how he approached nationalist mobilization and interethnic conflicts throughout his period in office. Prominent scholars agree that Gorbachev was blind in managing the national question. The article argues that, while Gorbachev could not elaborate a compelling nationalities policy, his approach did not fundamentally differ from the one he adopted in other policy spheres. Besides, the article shows how his position on the Baltic states and Ukraine led to growing disagreements with some of his key advisors. Also, it stresses the dilemmas Gorbachev had to cope with when dealing with the national question, which he could have hardly solved with single solutions or a new conception of nationalities policy. The article builds on declassified material, Gorbachev’s speeches, notes of the Politburo meetings, and memoirs of former Soviet politicians.
Abstract
Gorbachev’s 1997 television ad for Pizza Hut, which opened its first restaurants in the Soviet Union in 1990 through a joint venture between parent company PepsiCo, Inc. and the Moscow city soviet, is an important part of his popular image in the West, reflecting the role that capitalist consumerism is often presumed to have played in the Soviet system’s collapse. Yet, as this article shows, such joint ventures were supposed to increase the Soviet Union’s role not as a consumer, but as a producer, by showcasing the benefits of international economic cooperation with it. Joint ventures won Gorbachev powerful allies, including the CEO of Pepsi, Donald H. Kendall, who advocated for removing American trade restrictions that stood in the way of the Soviet Union assuming a larger function in world trade. As Gorbachev’s economic reforms began to fail, however, the long line in front of Pizza Hut also came to symbolize communism’s failure to deliver prosperity. Gorbachev used the difficulties of foreign companies like Pizza Hut as proof of why the Soviet Union should be given Western aid, to no avail. Ultimately, the policy of joint ventures was a failure and Pizza Hut’s presence in the post-Soviet Russian market was short lived: it left during the 1998 ruble crisis only to return under Putin in the early 2000s, only to leave once again after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Abstract
This paper focusses on the use of the sacred space of monasteries for the punishment of criminals and their simultaneous spiritual purification. The uniqueness and therefore special heuristic value of study into this phenomenon is determined by the following circumstances. The ritual of tonsure has long been used by rulers to punish undesirable and dangerous individuals and remove them from proximity to the throne. However, the “honor” of such a manifestation of royal anger was only awarded to those belonging to the tsar’s inner circle, and disgraced courtiers did not find themselves locked behind monastic walls for the sake of their internal spiritual correction, but solely in order to isolate them. During the reign of Catherine II, the Empress’s own initiative saw a marked increase in the practice of penance in monasteries as punishment for serious crimes. It is noteworthy that such sentences first appeared in Catherine’s written confirmations of sentences, after which they began to be widely utilized by the secular courts. The conclusions of this work are based on royal confirmations of death sentences passed by the Senate, the archives of the local chancelleries, and reports submitted by the abbots of monastic foundations. These materials enable us to draw preliminary conclusions regarding the gradual humanization of punishments in Russia in the second half of the 18th century and the growing use of ecclesiastical practices in court sentences, all at a time in which the scope of spiritual jurisdiction was being reduced.
Abstract
This paper argues that to understand Gorbachev’s early policy choices, one must place them into the political context of late-Soviet politics. Gorbachev and his coalition came to power seeking not to replace the previous era’s economic policy priorities but to fulfill them. Their program derived from a belief in the priority of new technology to Soviet growth and the role of the ossified socio-economic system from incorporating innovations into production. As such, Gorbachev’s early actions – including a now derided drive to discipline labor and boost investment into new capital – were the core of his agenda to rapidly reconstruct the socio-economic system. This narrative pushes against characterizations of Gorbachev and his allies as figures who knew better but were stymied by powerful entrenched interests.
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.
Abstract
Archie Brown notes how the meaning of perestroika, a concept Gorbachev used well before he became Soviet leader, changed over time. The focus is on Gorbachev as a politician operating in the Soviet domestic context. Contrary to widespread retrospective belief, the USSR was not in crisis when Gorbachev became general secretary, and he was not forced to embark on fundamental change. He began with the aim of achieving economic reform and some political liberalization. However, from January 1987 onwards, he prioritized political reform. His thinking continued to evolve, and by 1988–89 he had embraced not only liberalization but a political pluralization that amounted to systemic change. Such, however, was the intertwining of party and state that abandonment of ‘democratic centralism’ and the Communist Party’s monopoly of power led to a crisis of Soviet statehood by 1990–91 and to perestroika’s major unintended consequence – the dissolution of the USSR. Through persuasion and negotiation, rather than violent coercion, Gorbachev had tried and failed to prevent this disintegration of the USSR. But, successfully overcoming entrenched conservative resistance, he had already used the authority of his office and his powers of persuasion to leave Russia a freer country than it had ever been.
Abstract
The Soviet Union, like the large, multiethnic land empires in Europe that came to an end in the early 20th century (Habsburg, Imperial Russian, Ottoman), consisted of a central government ruling over far-flung regions in which particular ethnic and cultural groups were predominant. For many years, Soviet leaders were able to maintain the internal stability of the multiethnic Soviet state by relying on a mix of extreme coercion and occasional concessions to local demands. Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, he adopted sweeping political liberalization and democratization, including the first free elections ever held in the USSR. The loosening of political control in a state that had long been known for brutal repression had far-reaching consequences for social stability. The political opportunities that opened for ethnic groups in the Soviet Union to push for far-reaching change, including independence, created great difficulty for Gorbachev’s attempts to hold the Soviet Union together. Although he could have resorted to the use of large-scale violence as previous Soviet leaders had repeatedly done, he was deeply reluctant to cause mass bloodshed. His aversion to the use of mass repression was one of the key factors that precipitated the unraveling of the USSR. This article presents an in-depth analysis of Gorbachev’s responses to ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union from 1986 through 1991.
Abstract
Scholars of Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet collapse usually note that the last Soviet leader underestimated the power of nationalist mobilization and acted belatedly, and ineffectually, to stop it. In this article, I consider the effects of the strategy that Gorbachev adopted in the wake of the Alma-Ata events (remembered as Jeltoqsan in Kazakhstan), when protests erupted after an ethnic Russian from outside the republic was installed as first secretary. Gorbachev realized the importance of nationalist sentiment and was sympathetic to many of the grievances raised by intellectuals. He hoped that better knowledge of the problem would help him manage it, and he counted on the intellectuals to make common cause with their counterparts across the USSR. They did so, but the all-union publications, institutions, and networks to which they turned ultimately amplified nationalist sentiment and catalyzed the movement for independence, undermining the prospects of all-union reform. I explore this phenomenon by considering the Aral-88 expedition, the role of journals like Druzhba Narodov, and knowledge production on the region among ethnographers and economists at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.
Abstract
Comments from around the world following Gorbachev’s death revealed yet again how polarized views of him are. Most Westerners still see him as a man who changed his country and the world for the better. Most Russians condemn him for having intentionally or unintentionally destroyed the USSR. This essay attempts to reassess his record – to ask what a leader like him was to do when he had noble aims for his country and the world and possessed the power potentially to achieve them, but confronted huge obstacles to doing so. Should he have pursued them at the risk not only of failure, but of making things worse? Should he have settled for presiding over the status quo and preserving his own power? To address such questions, I pose others: What were Gorbachev’s goals and how did he come by them? Were they so ambitious as to be unrealistic? Did he have sufficient power as Soviet leader possibly to achieve them? What obstacles did he face? Did he foresee them? How effectively did he cope with them? Were there alternatives that were preferable to his approach? I conclude that Gorbachev was right to make the attempt.