Perestroika and the Problem of Socialist Renewal

Mikhail Gorbachev promised the assembled delegates of the 19th Party Conference of the CPSU in the summer of 1988 that democratization, economic reform, and transformation of the political will make perestroika irreversible; through revolutionary perestroika our society will reach a new state, and socialism will be given a humane and image.' Now, in the summer of 1990, the collapse of the Soviet has reached crisis proportions; ethnic unrest continues to flare up across the country; radical leaders like Boris Yeltsin have emerged to challenge Gorbachev and his advisors as leaders of perestroika, and the slogans sovereignty and market economy have become the rallying cries of most of the USSR's republican parliaments. While the debate over the irreversibility of perestroika continues, the real struggle is over the shape of the qualitatively new of Soviet society - will there be a Union, and will there be socialism? All of the basic premises that together constituted the foundation of the neo-Stalinist in Soviet domestic politics have now been called into question: strict central planning, collectivized agriculture, the leading role of the party, centralism, even the false federalism of the Union itself, are being challenged from above and from below. The old bureaucratic-administrative system has its defenders - both in the state and in society - and this is part of the drama. But the more interesting issue is that among reformers in the Soviet Union there is profound disagreement about what perestroika means, about what kind of should replace the old - in other words, about the correct alternative to Stalinism. In the Soviet Union today, perestroika is at once a set of policies and a concept that groups with profoundly different agendas are attempting to appropriate and infuse with a meaning amenable to their visions of social change. The extent to which any of these visions approaches the new, humane, and democratic socialism of Gorbachev's speech is the central question - not only for the future of Soviet society, but for the future of the socialist project more generally. The crisis of the Soviet and the attempt to redefine the meaning of socialism in the USSR have developed at a time when socialists in the West are also struggling to construct or reconstruct a viable socialist alternative to what has been called actually existing capitalism2 in America and Western Europe. This debate ranges from differing strategies

Economic system · Economics · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History