Gorbachev the Gambler: Democratization

Abstract

During his early days in office, the time of uskoreniye, Gorbachev had assumed that the main obstacle to meaningful reform would be the laziness and self-interest of individual scoundrels and slackers, and so he tried to purge them and spur them on. Later he turned to glasnost’ when he began to see the problem more in terms of the need to mobilize opinion and isolate enemies of reform within the Party. Increasingly, though, he came to see the problem not to be particular people within the CPSU so much as the institution of the Party itself. Some urged him then to break with it, but Gorbachev’s problem was that he was trying to reconcile his divided loyalties. He was a genuinely committed Communist and also a Soviet/Russian patriot. The one required him to stay within the Party and reform it from within, the other to break the Party and thus its dead grip upon the country.