Introduction

Abstract

When Gorbachev assumed power a decade ago, few in the former USSR or the West realized the impact that he would have. While Western politicians and the media had their own interpretations and agendas, within the framework of Russian Bolshevism he represented for some an attempt to return to the true ‘Leninist’ path and to overturn Stalinism, the system that had emerged from 1928–9. The Gorbachev years viewed the era of Stalin and the system that accompanied it as an aberration of history, preferring to look back to the 1920s and the New Economie Policy, the time of a mixed economy when state control coalesced with private enterprise, when socialist development meant gradualism and persuasion, and when socialism in the USSR might have assumed a human face. Some commentators in the FSU assumed that jettisoning the Stalinist era and returning to the ‘co-operative period’ of the 1920s could provide future paths for Soviet development.