Perestroika was one of the two main elements of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s original plans for wide-ranging reform in the then Soviet Union, along with glasnost. Technically perestroika simply means ‘restructuring’, but it rapidly took on extra ideological meaning. The proposal for perestroika was made in January 1987 at a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee, and combined plans for both economic reorganization and some limited democratization, mainly in local government. These were linked, because the politburo had been convinced by Gorbachev that the reason earlier attempts at economic reform had not worked was the absence of grass roots level democracy. Thus even at the industrial level perestroika was essentially political, requiring, for example, the election of factory managers by the workers. More directly political, a limited degree of choice was to be allowed to voters in local elections, where they would now be given a choice of candidates, though they would all still be nominated by the CPSU. The important point is that perestroika was, initially, a plan to reform the existing economic system of state control, and not to replace it, so policies were aimed at increasing the incentives to operate the current system more efficiently.
Perestroika was extended, in theory, to all state organizations. The Soviet military, for example, was called upon to apply perestroika, though as democracy is incompatible with military authority it was never very clear what they were supposed to do. In general, perestroika was what a Western manager would think of as an efficiency drive. The CPSU itself was supposed to become more democratic, although this did not mean, even to Gorbachev, that it should cease to be an all-pervading controlling force. Even these very moderate reforms were hotly contested by many inside the Politburo and the Central Committee, and it is unclear how effective they were, or ever could have been, in the industrial and administrative structures. It is hard to know how far the coverage of the term perestroika should be stretched, but it was certainly not originally intended to imply the much more far-reaching democratization of the political system that finally led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In contrast to glasnost, which proved unstoppable, perestroika achieved very little. The modernizations to the Soviet industrial and institutional systems with which perestroika sought to solve the problems which had allowed its own acceptance were proved to have been too little, and to have been introduced too late.
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