The Decline and Fall of the USSR

The Role of Glasnost and Perestroika

- Rajesh Tyagi/ 29.5.2026

As the post WWII immense growth of the Soviet economy, continued to hit at the policies based on Stalinist perspective of “Socialism in One Country”, the conflict grew steadily between the two. While the economic expansion of the Soviet economy placed demand for access to the global resources, primarily to the international division of labor, the Stalinist regime resisted hard to keep the Soviet life hermetically sealed off from outside.

As the general fall of world economy set in after two decades of spiralling after WWII, the bureaucratic dominance of Soviet Union faced a huge crisis. The planned economy under it became a real disaster for the people. While expanding economic life demanded democracy of producers and consumers alongside freedom of criticism and initiative, the totalitarian regime of flattery, fear and lies, founded by Stalin contradicted it.

Fear of bureaucracy rose steadily of this development. Having iron laws already at its hand that required every typewriter and duplicator to be registered with police authorities and licenced by them with stringent punishment for non-compliance, the ruling bureaucracy developed morbid fear of computer technology and widespread use of computers.

1960s and 70s thus witnessed huge built up of popular mass resistance against the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Strikes and mass protests were brutally suppressed by bureaucracy.

As Khrushchev attempted to save his own skin by putting all blame for this chaos on the dead Stalin, a section of Soviet bureaucracy saw this critique as the source of all chaos. It removed Khrushchev from power in October 1964. Leonid Brezhnev, took the reigns of power and started a vile campaign to suppress all de-Stalinization propaganda.

To establish the political legitimacy of the regime, the dissidents were jailed or exiled. Sinyavsky and later Alexander Solzhenitsyn were punished. This repression however served to discredit the regime and further isolate it from the people.

If 1968 “Prague Spring,” frightened the Soviet bureaucracy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the same year further alienated it from the people. In 1970, mass strikes in Poland brought down the regime of Gomulka.

Those who still had illusion in Stalinist bureaucratic regimes in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and still believed in the possibility of reforms of a democratic and socialistic character, lost the hope completely.

As mass Solidarity movement took hold in Poland in 1980, Soviet bureaucracy viewed it as an alarm for itself.

To counter it, Brezhnev embraced the Stalinist orthodoxy with renewed vigour, while simultaneously attempting rapprochement with US Imperialism. As in late 1970s, first the Carter and then Reagan regimes turned to confrontation, USSR faced a new challenge.

Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, was met with serious economic crisis and stagnation. KGB director Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev, vowed to implement reforms to restore the credibility of the regime and increase productivity. Failing to recognise the nationally oriented character of the Soviet economy, Andropov failed.

Konstantin Chernenko, who assumed office after Andropov, was another failure. Mikhail Gorbachev, then succeeded Chernenko and adopted policies oriented to restoration of capitalism and liberal democracy. His crisis-ridden regime ended with the dissolution of the USSR.

Gorbachev initiated the famous twin policy of Glasnost and Perestroika- the bureaucratic maneuvers from above- aimed at diverting the mass opposition to the regime to tag it behind the maneuvers that would finally restore capitalism in the USSR.

The disintegration and disorientation of workers under decades of Stalinist rule, was the mainstay of Gorbachev’s maneuver besides the critical support from the petty-bourgeois radical left, inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Besides a huge section of Stalinist leaders and Parties all over the world, leaders like Gerry Healy, Ernest Mandel and his disciple Tariq Ali cheered and promoted the twin maneuver.  They, however, failed to foresee or predict the fall of Soviet Union, a couple of years after. 

In turning to Glasnost and Perestroika, Gorbachev however was implicitly conceding the failure of the national-socialist premise of ‘socialism in one country’.

While bureaucracy focussed on its palliative care, the real crisis of the Soviet economy, remained rooted in its isolation from the global economic resources of the world economy.

In fact, there existed two ways to tackle the crisis that confronted the USSR- the way proposed by Gorbachev that involved the dismantling of state industry, the renunciation of all planning, the abandonment of the state monopoly on foreign trade and finally reintegration of the Soviet Union into the structure of world imperialism, while the alternative to this retrogressive solution required the challenge to imperialism’s domination over the world economy through linking up the Soviet and international working class in a revolutionary offensive against it.

The twin maneuvers-Glasnost and Perestroika- opened the floodgates for free discussion in the Soviet Union. Recognising that the Moscow trials were based on lies, the regime rehabilitated the Old Bolshevik veterans, the victims of bloody Stalinist repression- Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, all except Trotsky as Trotsky’s criticism of Soviet regime attacked the social interests of the bureaucracy as a whole, his ideas being a live threat to the plans of capitalist restoration under Gorbachev himself. In 1987, Gorbachev insisted that Trotsky’s ideas were “essentially an attack on Leninism all down the line.”

What Gorbachev concealed was that the capitalist restoration in USSR could only take place through widespread destruction of the existing productive forces and the ensuing social and political institutions and reintegration of the USSR into the structure of the world imperialist economy.

Soviet bureaucracy, led by Gorbachev, thus prepared the ground for a social tragedy, that in no time resulted in fall of the USSR.

The twin maneuver of Glasnost and Perestroika were not the recipe for the ‘slow development of a backward national economy’ as was propagated by its proponents and supporters, but the rapid route to the destruction of the one that had raised the living standards of Soviet workers close to those in the most advanced capitalist countries.

Far from being any radical or progressive measure to reform the state and economy of degenerated USSR, Glasnost and Perestroika were the reactionary maneuver of a section of Stalinist bureaucracy, then led by Gorbachev, for restoration of capitalism in USSR.

The backdrop for this maneuver was set by the deepening crisis in the Soviet Union and its Stalinist regime.

The course of events that finally led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, however, cannot be attributed solely to Gorbachev’s maneuver. It was rather a protracted course spanned over decades and rooted in the reactionary and nationally oriented project of ‘socialism in one country’ inaugurated and promoted by Stalin himself.