Gorbachev and the place of the party in Soviet reform, 1985–91

Abstract

THE EVENTS OF AUGUST 1991 have at last opened up the possibility of radical reform in the former Soviet Union. Although Soviet politics have changed dramatically since 1985, there was always a moment of indecision in the reformist political project of Gorbachev. No matter how far the Soviet political system was changed between 1985 and 1991 the idea of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as an institution whose role was to provide some form of pivotal leadership, remained embedded in the discourse of Gorbachevian reformism. August 1991 finally demonstrated the incompatibility of maintaining the CPSU and achieving real political reform in the USSR. In so doing it has put a full stop to the hesitancy of Gorbachevism. Gorbachev's call to give the party a 'kiss of life' on his return to Moscow was the last gasp of the old reformist project in the USSR. Yet that project and its responsibility for producing the circumstances that led to the coup have still to be fully explained. All the institutional and economic reforms that were launched during the perestroika period were, in some way or other, concerned with the place and role of the CPSU in the Soviet system. Yet analyses of the changes in the institutions of representation and government have not really focused on the place of the CPSU within them. They have by and large assumed that these changes were designed to curb the power of the party in general. This led us to viewing the processes of political reform as some kind of zero-sum game in which the battle was to transfer power away from the party once and for all. This skewed our perception of the process of change in the USSR, since it placed too much emphasis on the purposive character of political change in general. In other words, treating political reform in the USSR as though it were a fully conscious attempt by Gorbachev to shift power away from the CPSU to other bodies has led to too much concentration on the democratic side of reformist discourse and on Gorbachev as a democrat. This has given analyses of the reform processes a onesided flavour. In charting the course of development of reform we have only been consistent in looking for what was detrimental to the CPSU in Gorbachev's reforms.