Dictionary:

perestroika

  (pĕr'ĭ-stroi'kə)

The restructuring of the Soviet economy and bureaucracy that began in the mid 1980s.

[Russian perestroĭka : pere-, around, again (from Old Russian) + stroĭka, construction (from stroit’, to build, from Old Russian stroiti, from strojĭ, order).]

ܖperǝˈstroikǝ n. (in the former Soviet Union) the policy or practice of restructuring or reforming the economic and political system. First proposed by Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 and actively promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika originally referred to increased automation and labor efficiency, but came to entail greater awareness of economic markets and the ending of central planning. See also glasnost.)

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

From a Russian word meaning ‘restructuring’, perestroika was adopted as the official policy of the Soviet Communist Party following the plenum of the Central Committee in April 1987. Although the term itself was not new in Soviet political parlance, the policy is inextricably linked in the popular mind with Mikhail Gorbachev. Its meaning, however, is still hotly debated. For many commentators, perestroika was another attempt to invigorate the Soviet system by fostering grass-roots initiative without allowing a challenge to the power of the Communist Party itself. For others, perestroika was an attempt by sections of the leadership to improve their position vis-à-vis rivals in the elite and sections of the recalcitrant bureaucracy by playing the democratic card. For others still, perestroika was an essentially democratic movement of those, including some in the leadership, who opposed the authoritarianism and inefficiency of the old system. Whatever the case, perestroika resulted in both democratization and the articulation of demands that went well beyond the capacity of the Communist Party to control. It allowed for the end to the Cold War and of the division of Europe, and resulted in the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

— Stephen Whitefield

For more information on perestroika, visit Britannica.com.

Perestroika was the term given to the reform process launched in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Meaning "reconstruction" or "restructuring," perestroika was a concept that was both ambiguous and malleable. Its ambiguity lay in the fact that it might convey no more than a reorganization of existing Soviet institutions and thus be a synonym for reform of a modest kind or, alternatively, it could signify reconstruction of the system from the foundations up, thus amounting to transformative change. The vagueness and ambiguity were initially an advantage, for even the term reform had become taboo during the conservative Leonid Brezhnev years after the Soviet leadership had been frightened by the Prague Spring reforms of 1968.

Perestroika had the advantage of coming without political and ideological baggage. Everyone could - in the first two years, at least, of the Mikhail Gorbachev era - be in favor of it. Its malleability meant that under this rubric some urged modest change that in their view was enough to get the economy moving again while others who wished to transform the way the entire system worked were able to advance more daring arguments, taking cover under the umbrella of perestroika. Within Gorbachev's own top leadership team, both Yegor Ligachev and Alexander Yakovlev expressed their commitment to perestroika, but for the latter this meant much more far-reaching political reform than for the former. Once political pluralism had by 1989 become an accepted norm, perestroika as a concept had largely outlived its political utility.

For Gorbachev himself the term "perestroika" meant different things at different times. Initially, it was a euphemism for "reform," but later it came to signify systemic change. Gorbachev's views underwent a major evolution during the period he held the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and that included the meaning he imparted to perestroika. In an important December 1984 speech before he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev had said that one of the important things on the agenda was a "perestroika of the forms and methods of running the economy." By 1987 the concept for Gorbachev was much broader and clearly embraced radical political reform and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy. Gorbachev's thinking at that time was set out in a book, Perestroika: New Thinking for our Country and the World. While the ideas contained were far removed from traditional Soviet dogma, they by no means yet reflected the full evolution of Gorbachev's own position (and, with it, his understanding of perestroika). In 1987 Gorbachev was talking about radical reform of the existing system. During the run-up to the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party, held in the summer of 1988, he came to the conclusion that the system had to be transformed so comprehensively as to become something different in kind. In 1987 he still spoke about "communism," although he had redefined it to make freedom and the rule of law among its unfamiliar values; by the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev had given up speaking about "communism." The "socialism," of which he continued to speak, had become socialism of a social democratic type.

Perestroika became an overarching conception, under which a great many new concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse after 1985. These included such departures from the Marxist-Leninist lexicon as glasnost (openness, transparency), pravovoe gosudarstvo (a state based on the rule of law), checks and balances, and pluralism. One of the most remarkable innovations was Gorbachev's breaking of the taboo on speaking positively about pluralism. Initially (in 1987) this was a "socialist pluralism" or a "pluralism of opinion." That, however, opened the way for others in the Soviet Union to talk positively about "pluralism" without the socialist qualifier. By early 1990 Gorbachev himself had embraced the notion of "political pluralism," doing so at the point at which he proposed to the Central Committee removing from the Soviet Constitution the guaranteed "leading role" of the Communist Party.

Even perestroika as understood in the earliest years of Gorbachev's leadership - not least because of its embrace of glasnost - opened the way for real political debate and political movement in a system which had undergone little fundamental political change for decades. In his 1987 book, Perestroika,

Gorbachev wrote: "Glasnost, criticism and self-criticism are not just a new campaign. They have been proclaimed and must become a norm in the Soviet way of life . There is no democracy, norcan there be, without glasnost. And there is no present-day socialism, nor can there be, without democracy." Such exhortation was alarming to those who wished to preserve the Soviet status quo or to revert to the status quo ante. It was, though, music to the ears of people who wished to promote the more rapid democratization of the Soviet system, even to advocate moving further and faster than Gorbachev at the time was prepared to endorse.

If perestroika is considered as an epoch in Soviet and Russian history, rather than a concept (though conceptual change in a hitherto ideocratic system was crucially important), it can be seen as one in which a Pandora's box was opened. The system, whatever its failings, had been highly effective in controlling and suppressing dissent, and it was far from being on the point of collapse in 1985. Perestroika produced both intended and unintended consequences. From the outset Gorbachev's aims included a liberalization of the Soviet system and the ending of the Cold War. Liberalization, in fact, developed into democratization (the latter term being one that Gorbachev used from the beginning, although its meaning, too, developed within the course of the next several years) and the Cold War was over by the end of the 1980s. A major aspect of perestroika in its initial conception was, however, to inject a new dynamism into the Soviet economy. In that respect it failed. Indeed, Gorbachev came to believe that the Soviet economic system, just like the political system, needed not reform but dismantling and to be rebuilt on different foundations.

The ultimate unintended consequence of perestroika was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Liberalization and democratization turned what Gorbachev had called "pre-crisis phenomena" (most notably, economic stagnation) during the early 1980s into a full-blown crisis of survival of the state by 1990 - 1991. Measuring such an outcome against the initial aims of perestroika suggests its failure. But the goals of the foremost proponents of perestroika, and of Mikhail Gorbachev personally, rapidly evolved, and democratization came to be given a higher priority than economic reform. At the end of this experiment in the peaceful transformation of a highly authoritarian system, there were fifteen newly independent states and Russia itself had become a freer country than at any point in its previous history. Taken in conjunction with the benign transformation of East-West relations, these results constitute major achievements that more than counterbalance the failures. They point also to the fact that there could be no blueprint for the democratization of a state that had been at worst totalitarian and at best highly authoritarian for some seven decades. Perestroika became a process of trial and error, but one that was underpinned by ideas and values radically different from those which constituted the ideological foundations of the unreformed Soviet system.

Bibliography

Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. New York: Oxford University Press.

English, Robert D. (2000). Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. London: Collins.

Gorbachev, Mikhail, and Mlynar, Zdenek. (2002). Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Matlock, Jack F., Jr. (1995). Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House.

—ARCHIE BROWN

Russian term
перестройка
Translit: perestroika
English: restructuring

This article is about the term. For the computer game, see Perestroika (computer game). For the play by Tony Kushner, see Angels in America.

Perestroika ( pronunciation?, Russian: Перестройка IPA: [pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə]) is the Russian term (now used in English) for the economic reforms introduced in June 1985 by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring," referring to the restructuring of the Soviet economy.

The perestroika program

Poster showing Mikhail Gorbachev, with the slogan perestroika

During the initial period (1985-1991) of Mikhail Gorbachev's time in power, he talked about modifying central planning, but did not make any truly fundamental changes (uskoreniye, acceleration). Gorbachev and his team of economic advisers then introduced more fundamental reforms, which became known as perestroika (economic restructuring).

At the June 1987 plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Gorbachev presented his "basic theses," which laid the political foundation of economic reform for the remainder of the existence of the Soviet Union.

In July 1987, the Supreme Soviet passed the Law on State Enterprise. The law stipulated that state enterprises were free to determine output levels based on demand from consumers and other enterprises. Enterprises had to fulfill state orders, but they could dispose of the remaining output as they saw fit. Enterprises bought inputs from suppliers at negotiated contract prices. Under the law, enterprises became self-financing; that is, they had to cover expenses (wages, taxes, supplies, and debt service) through revenues. No longer was the government to rescue unprofitable enterprises that could face bankruptcy. Finally, the law shifted control over the enterprise operations from ministries to elected workers' collectives. Gosplan's (Russian: Государственный комитет по планированию, State Committee for Planning) responsibilities were to supply general guidelines and national investment priorities, not to formulate detailed production plans.

The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1988, was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev regime. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. The law initially imposed high taxes and employment restrictions, but it later revised these to avoid discouraging private-sector activity. Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene.

Gorbachev brought perestroika to the Soviet Union's foreign economic sector with measures that Soviet economists considered bold at that time. His program virtually eliminated the monopoly that the Ministry of Foreign Trade had once held on most trade operations. It permitted the ministries of the various industrial and agricultural branches to conduct foreign trade in sectors under their responsibility rather than having to operate indirectly through the bureaucracy of trade ministry organizations. In addition, regional and local organizations and individual state enterprises were permitted to conduct foreign trade. This change was an attempt to redress a major imperfection in the Soviet foreign trade regime: the lack of contact between Soviet end users and suppliers and their foreign partners.

The most significant of Gorbachev's reforms in the foreign economic sector allowed foreigners to invest in the Soviet Union in the form of joint ventures with Soviet ministries, state enterprises, and cooperatives. The original version of the Soviet Joint Venture Law, which went into effect in June 1987, limited foreign shares of a Soviet venture to 49 percent and required that Soviet citizens occupy the positions of chairman and general manager. After potential Western partners complained, the government revised the regulations to allow majority foreign ownership and control. Under the terms of the Joint Venture Law, the Soviet partner supplied labor, infrastructure, and a potentially large domestic market. The foreign partner supplied capital, technology, entrepreneurial expertise, and, in many cases, products and services of world competitive quality.

Gorbachev's economic changes did not do much to restart the country's sluggish economy in the late 1980s. The reforms decentralized things to some extent, although price controls remained, as did the ruble's inconvertibility and mostly government control over the means of production.

By 1990 the government had virtually lost control over economic conditions. Government spending increased sharply as an increasing number of unprofitable enterprises required state support and consumer price subsidies continued. Tax revenues declined because revenues from the sales of vodka plummeted during the anti-alcohol campaign and because republic and local governments withheld tax revenues from the central government under the growing spirit of regional autonomy. The elimination of central control over production decisions, especially in the consumer goods sector, led to the breakdown in traditional supply-demand relationships without contributing to the formation of new ones. Thus, instead of streamlining the system, Gorbachev's decentralization caused new production bottlenecks.

Unforeseen results of reform

The new system bore the characteristics of neither central planning nor a market economy. Instead, the Soviet economy went from stagnation to deterioration. At the end of 1991, when the union officially dissolved, the national economy was in a virtual tailspin. In 1991 Soviet GDP had declined by 17 percent and was declining at an accelerating rate. Over inflation was becoming a major problem. Between 1990 and 1991, retail prices in the Soviet Union increased 140 percent.

Under these conditions, the general quality of life for the Soviet people deteriorated. The public traditionally faced shortages of durable goods, but under Gorbachev, food, clothes, and other basic necessities were in short supply. Fueled by the liberalized atmosphere of Gorbachev's glasnost and by the general improvement in information access in the late 1980s, public dissatisfaction with economic conditions was becoming much more overt than ever before in the Soviet period. The foreign-trade sector of the Soviet economy also showed signs of deterioration. The total Soviet hard-currency debt increased appreciably, and the Soviet Union, which had established an impeccable record for debt repayment in earlier decades, had accumulated sizable arrears by 1990. It did free up the arts and social sciences in the region and enabled formerly banned literature and films to be reconstructed to a degree, with filmmakers like Sergei Parajanov now out of prison.

In sum, the Soviet Union left a legacy of economic inefficiency and deterioration to the fifteen constituent republics after its breakup in December 1991. Arguably, the shortcomings of the Gorbachev reforms had contributed to the economic decline and eventual destruction of the Soviet Union, leaving Russia and the other successor states to pick up the pieces and to try to mold market economies.^{[citation needed]} At the same time, the Gorbachev programs did start Russia on the precarious road to full-scale economic reform.

The failures of perestroika have led Alexander Zinovyev to coin the word catastroika (Russian катастройка), a blend of катастрофа - "catastrophe" and perestroika. Zinovyev wrote: "the effect of explanatory work has appeared the return desirable. All they wished to avoid, has occurred with double the force... Queues lengthened. Prices in the markets have jumped. At home, in queues, in transport, on work, at assemblies people have openly worn the perestroyka. Uncountable jokes were told. Someone has learned, that the word "perestroyka" is translated on the Greek language by a word "accident". On this basis a new word "katastroyka" has appeared. Pensioners and older Party members saw in perestroika the counterrevolution and betrayal of Lenin's cause". Philip Hanson used this word in his book, From Stagnation to Catastroika: Commentaries on the Soviet Economy, 1983-1991.

Comparison with China

Perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms have similar origins but very different effects on their respective countries' economies. Both efforts occurred in large communist countries attempting to modernize their economies, but while China's GDP has grown consistently since the late 1980s (albeit from a much lower level), national GDP in the USSR and in many of its successor states fell precipitously throughout the 1990s[1].

Gorbachev's reforms were largely a top-down attempt at reform, and maintained many of the macroeconomic aspects of the command economy (including price controls, inconvertibility of the ruble, exclusion of private property ownership, and the government monopoly over most means of production). Reform was largely focused on industry and on cooperatives, and a limited role was given to the development of foreign investment and international trade. Factory managers were expected to meet state demands for goods, but to find their own funding. Perestroika reforms went far enough to create new bottlenecks in the Soviet economy, but arguably did not go far enough to effectively streamline it. Chinese economic reform was, by contrast, a bottom-up attempt at reform, focusing on light industry and agriculture (namely allowing peasants to sell produce grown on private holdings at market prices). Economic reforms were fostered through the development of "Special Economic Zones", designed for export and to attract foreign investment, municipally-managed Township and Village Enterprises and a "dual pricing" system leading to the steady phasing out of state-dictated prices. Greater latitude was given to managers of state-owned factories, while capital was made available to them through a reformed banking system and through fiscal policies (in contrast to the fiscal anarchy and fall in revenue experienced by the Soviet government during perestroika).

Another fundamental difference is that where perestroika was accompanied by greater political freedoms under Gorbachev's glasnost policies, Chinese economic reform has been accompanied by continued authoritarian rule and a suppression of political dissidents, most notably at Tiananmen Square.

Summary

The perestroika reforms began the process leading to the dismantling of the Soviet-era command economy and its replacement with a market economy. However, the process arguably exacerbated already existing social and economic tensions within the Soviet Union, and no doubt helped to further nationalism among the constituent republics, as well as social fragmentation. The economic chaos that began with perestroika helped both to empower organized crime and allowed businessmen with the right connections to amass great personal fortunes as Russia's oligarchs. The economic freedoms instituted by Gorbachev under perestroika and the problems caused by these reforms arguably helped to begin the unraveling of Soviet society and hastened the end of the Soviet Union.

See also

• Dakin Building
• History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)
• Uskoreniye
• Glasnost
• Demokratizatsiya
• 500 Days
• Brezhnev stagnation
• Sumgait Massacre
• First Chechen War
• Nagorno-Karabakh war
• Georgian-Abkhaz conflict
• War of Transnistria
• Khojaly Massacre

References

• Cohen, Stephen F.; Katrina Vanden Heuvel (1989 repr. 1990). Voices of Glasnost: Interviews With Gorbachev's Reformers. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393307352. 
• Gorbachev, Mikhail (1988). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-091528-5. 
• Jha, Prem Shankar (2003). The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China. Pluto Press. ISBN 0745318517. 

External links

• Yakovlev on perestroika
• For a materialist vision of the perestroika - in Russian
• Perestroika in Ukraine

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - omfattende reformprogram

Nederlands (Dutch)
perestrojka (herstructurering)

Français (French)
n. - perestroïka

Deutsch (German)
n. - Perestroika (Umbau)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - περεστρόικα

Italiano (Italian)
perestroika

Português (Portuguese)
n. - perestroika (f) (abertura)

Русский (Russian)
перестройка

Español (Spanish)
n. - perestroika

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - omstrukturering (särsk. i fd. Sovjet)

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
俄国的重建, 改革

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 俄國的重建, 改革

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 페레스트로이카(옛 소련의 개혁 정책)

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ペレストロイカ, 旧ソ連で行われた政治経済の改革

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) نظام الانفتاح الاقتصادي و السياسي في روسيا‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮רפורמה כלכלית ומדינית בברה"מ, פרסטרויקה‬

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