System Change and Property Relations: On Perestroika’s Historical Experiences

Abstract

The chapter gives a detailed discussion of the role of property relations in the Soviet systemic change, the reasons that led to the triumph of Yeltsin over Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author views the dissolution of the Soviet Union as key to the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe. In the 1980s, a series of economic and management problems emerged in the Soviet Union, which posed an existential danger to the state. The decisions of the power elite, however, pointed not towards the solution of the crisis but the conservation of their own social positions through accelerating the regime change and the privatization of state property. The destruction of the Soviet state can therefore be at least party attributed to the power elite’s betrayal of the revolution as Trotsky predicted. The chapter documents this historical process in the light of archival evidence. It also gives a critical study of the social and civilizational decline that accompanied the political collapse.