Explaining Political Transformation in the Soviet Union

Abstract

In April 1989, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announced a major new initiative aimed at revitalising the countryside.¹The new rural policy was intended to be an important component of the wider programme of social and economic reconstruction initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and other reformist leaders of the Communist Party in the mid-1980s. While the programme was hardly radical in content, it nevertheless contained important new ideas about rural development and signalled a renewed commitment by the Soviet elite to tackling the immense problems that faced agriculture and the rural villages.²