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Perestroika in Historical Perspective: Possible Scenarios

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

L. Gordon  and
A. Nazimova
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Extract

A Major Obstacle to Grasping The Real Problems of perestroika is the underestimation of its contents and of the ensuing constellation of the social forces involved. Usually, perestroika is seen merely as a struggle between the advocates of democratization and sweeping economic reforms on the one hand, and the conservatives, who are deliberately or otherwise seeking to preserve the bureaucratic management practices which have emerged in the country over the last fifty years. All in all, such a characterization does correctly reflect the overall historical perspective. If the administrative system is not drastically restructured within a few decades, the country will suffer economic and political disaster. But when considering, say, the next five to ten years, things are rather more complex. In such a time-span very diverse scenarios are possible.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1990 , pp. 16 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

2 N. Andreyeva, a chemistry teacher at a Leningrad college, published a long article in Sovetskaia Rossia on 13 March 1988 in which she offered a vision of perestroika. It was the first time that the ideas of restricting perestroika to some minor improvements in the existing empirical social system were proclaimed so openly and in so aggressive a form. Moreover, N. Andreyeva insisted that the people who tried to carry out democratic reforms were enemies of socialism, and that it was necessary while effecting changes in our society to preserve its main principles, created in the course of Stalin’s period. All conservative elements greeted this article with enthusiasm, and all the democrats saw it as a manifesto of neo-Stalinist forces.