On the Role and Place of Perestroika in the Cycle of Russian — Soviet Reforms in XX Century: A Political Aspect

Abstract

The article analyzes the reforms of the political system of Russia, starting with the revolution of 1905 and ending with the reforms of Boris Yeltsin in the 90s of the twentieth century. The author shows t that the political model that had developed in tsarist Russia by the beginning of the last century did not meet the needs and realities of that time and did not allow the country to develop dynamically. The inconsistency of the reforms proposed by Nicholas II, against the background of Russia’s unsuccessful participation in the First World War, led the country in 1917, first to the February and then the October revolutions, which ended the monarchy, proclaimed a republic, first bourgeois, and then Soviet. But even these reforms did not allow us to abandon the authoritarian form of government that reigned in the Soviet Union for more than 70 years. The reform initiatives of the 60s by N. Khrushchev and A. Kosygin, aimed at softening the current political and economic regime, also had little success. The most decisive attempt to transform this regime towards its greater effectiveness and sustainability were the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, known as “perestroika”. They assumed a radical transformation of the existing political and economic slowness by giving it real competitiveness, more active involvement of citizens in public and business activity, rejection of the ideological and political monopolism of the Communist Party. But the initiators of perestroika failed to implement all these ideas in a short five-year period. Many of their ideas were embodied in the reforms of Boris Yeltsin, the results of which were enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 1993. But their practical implementation in the last decade of the twentieth century showed that so far Russia has not been able to completely abandon the ideas and principles of political monopolism, which do not allow the people to put into practice their socio-economic potential and ensure the country’s sustainable and progressive development.