History in 5 Minutes or less

Introduction: The Ticking Clock of Hope

In March 1985, after burying three infirm leaders in three years, the Politburo desperately needed a change in optics. They chose Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev—a man barely 54, vigorous, and intelligent. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev was not burdened by the horrors of Stalin’s purges or the paranoia of the Cold War’s peak. He genuinely believed that the Soviet system, the core socialist dream, was sound, but that it had been choked by corruption and Brezhnev’s bureaucratic sludge.

Gorbachev’s goal was not to dismantle the Soviet Union but to save it. He intended to clean the engine, not scrap the whole train. Yet, the tools he chose—the twin reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost—were so powerful, so fundamentally disruptive, that they quickly accelerated the Soviet Union’s terminal decline. They were the equivalent of injecting a powerful, untested drug into a terminally ill patient: a brief surge of energy followed by total systemic failure.

The New Man in the Kremlin: Gorbachev’s Mandate for Change

Gorbachev was a phenomenon. He was the first Soviet leader born after the 1917 Revolution and the first to have a college degree (in law). He spoke without reading from a script and, crucially, he brought his wife, Raisa, into the public eye—a visible, intelligent partner who shattered the traditional Soviet image of the reclusive, invisible leader’s spouse.

His fatal hubris was his conviction that he could manage the process of change. He believed the Party had merely made mistakes in execution, not in fundamental philosophy. He wanted to combine socialist principles with market efficiency and political accountability.

His initial mandate was simple: Uskoreniye (Acceleration)—speeding up the economy. But he quickly realized that the economy was too diseased for a simple speed boost. To fix the economics, he first had to fix the politics. He needed truth.

Perestroika (Restructuring): The Economic Half-Measure

Perestroika was Gorbachev’s term for radical economic reform. He recognized that the Gosplan’s centralized, top-down planning was bankrupt. His plan was to give factory managers more autonomy, allow them to keep a share of the profits, and judge them on quality rather than just quotas.

The Quota Conundrum

The core problem remained that the system was built around state control, and Gorbachev never fully relinquished it.

• The Law on State Enterprise (1987): Gave factory managers more freedom, but the state still controlled the supply chain, raw materials, and most prices. Managers couldn’t get what they needed to produce goods, and the products they did make were often still bought by the state at arbitrary prices.
• The Law on Cooperatives (1988): This was the most radical reform, effectively legalizing small, private, for-profit businesses for the first time since Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Suddenly, small restaurants, repair shops, and trading firms popped up.

The Catastrophic Backlash: Instead of stability, Perestroika created chaos. The state still controlled the vast majority of resources, and the new cooperatives often had to bribe officials or use black-market connections to acquire basic supplies. The goods they produced were often excellent but were priced far higher than subsidized state goods, creating a deep sense of social injustice.

The worst effect was on the supply of basic goods. As the old Soviet supply chains began to break down due to decentralization, nothing arrived to replace them. The result was that shortages actually worsened under Gorbachev, leading to immense public frustration. The shelves were emptier than they had been under the ‘stagnant’ Brezhnev.

Example: The Failed Alcohol Campaign

In 1985, Gorbachev launched a fierce anti-alcohol campaign to boost labor productivity and health. He ordered vineyards destroyed, restricted sales, and dramatically hiked prices. While arguably a noble public health effort, it was an economic disaster.

Vodka taxes had historically been one of the largest single sources of state revenue. Cutting alcohol sales so severely immediately stripped the Kremlin of billions of rubles of income, exacerbating the budget crisis at the worst possible time and driving the entire liquor trade into the hands of organized crime. It was a perfect microcosm of Perestroika: good intentions leading to unintended, crippling consequences.

Glasnost (Openness): Speaking the Unspeakable

If Perestroika destabilized the economy, Glasnost (Transparency or Openness) politically annihilated the Party’s legitimacy. Gorbachev believed that to save socialism, he had to air out the musty political rooms and expose the stagnation and corruption of the old guard.

He allowed unprecedented freedom of speech, assembly, and access to history. The impact was instant and overwhelming.

• Reclaiming History: Soviet newspapers like Argumenty i Fakty suddenly became places of genuine debate. Historians began publishing the horrific truth about the Gulag system and the true death toll of Stalin’s Terror. The people discovered they had been systematically lied to for decades. The official ideology, already weak, lost all moral credibility overnight.
• The Return of the Dissident: Gorbachev famously phoned physicist and leading dissident Andrei Sakharov in internal exile in Gorky in 1986 and personally invited him to return to Moscow. Sakharov, far from being grateful, immediately used his platform to become a leading voice for genuine democracy and against the Party’s continued existence.

The Turning Point: The Chernobyl Disaster (1986)

Just one year into Glasnost, the system faced its ultimate stress test: the catastrophic explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on April 26, 1986.

The instinct of the old Soviet bureaucracy was to cover it up, just as they always had. Moscow was silent for two days, and only admitted the accident after Swedish monitoring stations detected massive radiation levels drifting over Scandinavia.

This event exposed the moral rot of the entire Soviet structure:

1. Technological Failure: A state built on industrial might proved incapable of managing its own technology safely.
2. Moral Failure: The state prioritized its image over the lives of its own citizens (who were initially left unaware of the danger).
3. Glasnost’s Triumph: Public pressure and the emerging transparency forced the government to eventually admit the truth, revealing the criminal incompetence of the old system to its people and the world. Chernobyl became a permanent scar on the Soviet psyche and a monument to the lies the Party had told.

The World Holds Its Breath: Ending the Cold War

The cost of the nuclear arms race was a major contributor to the Soviet Union’s bankruptcy. Gorbachev realized that to fund Perestroika, he had to stop trying to match the West militarily. This was his “New Thinking” in foreign policy: security achieved through political engagement, not military superiority.

His counterpart, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, initially called the USSR the “Evil Empire.” But the two leaders found a surprising rapport. Over a series of historic summits—Geneva (1985), Reykjavik (1986), Washington (1987), and Moscow (1988)—they fundamentally reshaped the geopolitical landscape.

The biggest achievement was the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated all ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It was the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons had been completely eliminated.

Gorbachev completed the policy shift by fulfilling Brezhnev’s most disastrous legacy: the Soviet troops were fully withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989. This ended a decade of bloodshed and signaled to the world that Moscow was no longer willing to impose its will by force abroad.

The Sinatra Doctrine: Letting the Empire Go

The ultimate, unavoidable consequence of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” was the loss of Eastern Europe—the Soviet Union’s crucial buffer zone created after World War II.

In a speech to the United Nations in 1988, Gorbachev effectively announced the Sinatra Doctrine (a nickname because nations could now do things “My Way”). He declared that every nation had the right to choose its own social and political system freely, and implicitly warned that the Soviet Army would not be coming to save communist regimes.

The Avalanche of 1989

Once the fear of Soviet tanks—the memory of Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968)—was removed, the satellite regimes collapsed like a house of cards:

• Poland: The Solidarity trade union movement won a landslide victory in the first partially free elections in June 1989, forcing the communists out of power.
• Hungary: The government opened its border with Austria, creating a critical escape route for East Germans.
• Czechoslovakia: The peaceful Velvet Revolution overthrew the communist regime in just weeks.
• Romania: The only violent overthrow, culminating in the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

The Final Symbol: The Fall of the Berlin Wall The most iconic moment of 1989 occurred on November 9. Following weeks of massive pro-democracy protests in East Germany, the communist regime decided to ease travel restrictions. A spokesman, attempting to announce the change in a confusing live press conference, mistakenly stated that the border crossing would be effective “immediately.”

Within hours, masses of East Berliners descended on the checkpoints. The overwhelmed guards, lacking orders from Moscow and knowing the Soviet Army would not intervene, simply opened the gates. The images of joyous Germans dismantling the Berlin Wall that night were beamed around the world. The physical, symbolic, and geopolitical division of Europe was over.

The collapse of the external empire in 1989 had a terrifying implication for Gorbachev: If Poland, Hungary, and East Germany were free, why not the 15 Soviet Republics themselves? By 1990, the spirit of independence had finally turned inward, setting the stage for the catastrophic final act.

Sources

• Taubman, William. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. (2017) – Essential biography covering the details of Perestroika and Glasnost and his foreign policy “New Thinking.”
• Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. (1987) – Provides direct insight into his goals and philosophy.
• Shleifer, Andrei, and Robert Vishny. The Grabbing Hand: Government and the Black Market in the Collapse of Communism. (1998) – Excellent source for the failures of Perestroika and the Law on Cooperatives.
• Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. (2019) – Detailed account of the disaster and its crucial role in exposing Soviet secrecy.