Explained: Perestroika and Glasnost – Gorbachev’s reform mantras

When Gorbachev took over as the General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, the then USSR was already groaning under the inefficiencies of a planned economy. While official data did not show it, the fact was that almost all of the USSR’s economic parameters — be it the GDP growth rate or labour productivity etc. — had collapsed since the start of 1970s. Gorbachev was acutely aware that the USSR needed to restructure its economy, and in particular, allow for a greater play of the market forces.

But his idea of perestroika was not limited to the economic sphere. He had hoped that just like ill-effects of a top-down planned economy had spread through the social and moral fabric of Soviet life, economic restructuring, too, will lead to a social and political renewal.

In his book “Perestroika: New thinking for our country and the world”, he explained why USSR needed “perestroika”:

“Perestroika is an urgent necessity arising from the profound processes of development in our socialist society…At some stage – this became particularly clear in the latter half of the seventies – something happened that was at first sight inexplicable. The country began to lose momentum. Economic failures became more frequent. Difficulties began to accumulate and deteriorate, and unresolved problems to multiply. Elements of what we call stagnation and other phenomena alien to socialism began to appear in the life of society. A kind of ‘braking mechanism’ affecting social and economic development formed. And all this happened at a time when scientific and technological revolution opened up new prospects for economic and social progress,” he wrote.

Gorbachev felt the economy was “ripe for change”. “It has long been yearning for it. Any delay in beginning perestroika could have led to an exacerbated internal situation in the near future, which, to put it bluntly, would have been fraught with serious social, economic and political crises,” he wrote.

Glasnost

Chris Miller starts his book “The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR”, with a “Note on Statistics”.

In it, Miller recounts an episode from 1982 between Gorbachev and then the USSR General Secretary Yuri Andropov.

Sample it:

“Not happening! You’re asking too much. The budget is off limits to you.” So spoke USSR General Secretary Yuri Andropov in 1982, when Mikhail Gorbachev asked to see the Soviet budget. Gorbachev was astounded that even an official such as himself—a Politburo member, one of the top dozen political figures in the entire country—was not allowed to see the country’s consolidated figures for revenue and expenditure. Only after becoming general secretary himself in 1985 did Gorbachev finally gain access to the Soviet budget. He discovered, he later wrote, that it was “full of holes.”

To be sure, according to Richard Sakwa’s book titled “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union”, in 1987 two economists G Khanin and V Selyunin were catapulted to fame when they argued that contrary to the official account — that in 1985 Soviet income had multiplied 84 times the 1928 level — the actual increase had been less than 7 times. In other words, the scale of Soviet achievements had been radically inflated and falsified by the officials.

This lack of transparency was at the heart of Gorbachev’s second mantras for reform: Glasnost — meaning openness. While it meant greater transparency in the functioning of the government and the economy, much like perestroika, Gorbachev’s hope was that this would also reorder the way people lived their everyday life in the USSR.