Perestroika as Revolution from within
An Interpretation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3532630 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Gooding (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 36 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Russian Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0036-0341 • E-ISSN: 1467-9434 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/131245 |
| OpenAlex | W2332899393 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
v hen Mikhail Gorbachev warned of a crisis situation in perestroika's early days, he had the air of crying wolf. Now no one can doubt that the Soviet Union is in crisis. The immediate precipitant of the crisis, whose roots go deep, has been the perestroika program itself. Yet until 1985, Western observers generally assumed that only if the regime faced destabilization would it pay the political price of radical reform and that its current problems, though grave, were unlikely to force real concessions out of it.1 Events, however, would disprove this analysis, and Konstantin Chernenko's successor embarked on radical change at a time when the dangers to the regime were no more than prospective. It was not to be destabilization that precipitated radical change, but radical change that precipitated destabilization. Why the Gorbachev regime risked destabilizing itself by unforced radicalism and how it pushed its policies through against fierce resistance will be the subject of the article. Most Western observers initially saw Gorbachev as no more than a cosmetic reformer. When this view became untenable, they tended instead to place him into another familiar category of Russian ruler: the above, who was pushing the country into a further phase of the revolution-stagnationrevolution cycle which it seemed incapable of escaping.2 This, however, was as wide of the mark as the earlier reading, even though the reforms indeed were instigated from above and revolutionary in scope. For revolutionaries-from
Economic history · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Ruler · Sociology · Soviet union · Successor cardinal · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1992 - 2022 (31) |
| Highly cited | No |