The Background to Perestroika: ‘Political Undercurrents’ Reconsidered in the Light of Recent Events

Abstract

In his speech to the Central Committee plenum in June 1987 Gorbachev announced that commodity-money relations or, in other words, the market, were becoming an organic part of the socialist system.¹ The Law on the State Enterprise, accepted by that meeting, anticipated that during 1988–9 all enterprises would become subject to the disciplines of full cost-accounting and self-financing.² Aganbegyan, one of Gorbachev’s principal economic advisers, subsequently made it clear that enterprises which persistently failed to support themselves would, in effect, be considered bankrupt and closed.³ At the June plenum Gorbachev left no doubt that, in his estimation, the causes of the present difficulties, which he identified as a pre-crisis situation, fundamentally arose from adhering to the command-administrative methods developed under Stalin, alternatives to which had been spurned by Brezhnev.⁴ During the course of 1988, Bukh-arin, the leading proponent of market socialism in the 1920s, was rehabilitated as increasing public attention was directed to scrutinising the impact and legacy of Stalinism.⁵ It appeared as if Soviet economic policy had come full circle, a circumnavigation that had taken sixty arduous years.