Gorbachev and the Age of Rebuilding - Essay Example

GORBACHEV AND THE AGE OF REBUILDING INTRODUCTION Mikhael Gorbachev is a Soviet sman made famous globally by his aggressive and radical methods and means of reform in the Soviet Union. Motivated by the country’s decline in the technological advancement which was essential to international power and status (Graham 1988: p. 23), he pursued to carry the greatest and most ambitious reforms the Soviet Union has witnessed in over 50 years. In order to understand how this came to be, it is of utmost importance to also look at the perspective of Gorbachev. Has he planned these changes all along? Did he really know what he was doing? Most of the radical reformists generally receive much doubt and unstable support simply because their theories have yet to be tested. It does not come as a surprise that many perceived Gorbachev was moving blind in his pursuit of reforms. But the author firmly believes that he had a clear and well equipped understanding on their position regarding what matters were needed to be reformed. Gorbachev literally grew up inside the sluggish Soviet system, thus he knew which components were hindering them from achieving good economic standing (Mcnair et al. 2005: p. 1). The West perceived him as a liberator and progressive leader with his foreign and domestic policies such as the Perestroika, which means restructuring or rebuilding, and the Glasnost which is literally translated as openness. These reforms were meant to remedy the economic deficiency of Russia and adapt better practices in the hope of making Russia a globally competitive economy. These policies, especially the Perestroika, received the spotlight since the USSR standard of living drastically collapsed together with the economy under his rule, and ultimately it also lead to the dissolution of the USSR. Perestroika is widely believed and argued to be also the main cause of the revolution of Eastern Europe in 1989 and also it contributed to the end of the Cold War (Heauel & Cohen 2009: p. 1). In the aftermath of these events, it is relevant to consider how Gorbachev has come up with such policies and aggressive reforms. Relevant also would be how he devised and schemed the plans to go, and how the plans later on faltered and backfired to Mother Russia despite all the good intentions and virtues that it bannered. The status quo before he came into power should also be put into consideration and also the consequences of the demise and how much should really be the attributed blame to his blunder. The policies of his predecessors, like Khruschchev, where the early stages of Perestroika was likened to his reforms during the 1950s and sixties (Tompson 1993: p. 73), should also be understood. This is necessary so as to learn how he then came to be with his political orientation and of what external factors are at play in influencing and engineering such policies. SHAPING A REFORMIST Before delving deeper into Gorbachev’s policies and reforms, one must first try to understand where he is coming from and how he came to be in power. His early life shaped how he came to be an aggressive reformist who later on became one of the most influential political figures in the XX century. Gorbachev was born into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family on March 2, 1931 (Ikeda & Gorbachev 2005: p. 11). Early in his childhood, he experienced the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 which claimed the lives of his two sisters (Gorbachev 2006: p. 10). His family started off as poor landless peasants but later on rose to become middle-class farmers because of the Soviet collectivization (Mcnair et al. 2005: p. 1). He recalls that “The peasant labor was very hard. It was back-breaking labor twenty hours a day, with no more than three or four hours of sleep. Yet it did not bring prosperity to the farmers. The only hope was the private plot of land where everything was cultivated to make ends meet somehow” (Gorbachev 1996: p. 36). It can be concluded that he is no stranger to the struggles of the lowest of classes for he experienced the hardships first-hand. A great influence on the life of Gorbachev was his family’s struggle for survival during the World War II under the brutal occupation of the Germans (Mcnair 2005: p. 2). The toll the war took upon the whole country was so great that everything prior to it became to waste and the people all had to start from scratch. He was then only fourteen when the war ended; but despite the youthfulness, he has already acquired the conviction and character of a leader. These struggles would shape Gorbachev to become a leader who desired to see his country come into fruition with its full potential. In his teenage years, he became an operator for harvesters on collective farms. Because of the fortunate rise of class of their family, Gorbachev managed to go to a university and finished with a law degree from Moscow State University and he then proceeded to be an agricultural economist and pursued a Masters degree for the same field from Stavropol Institute of Agriculture in 1967. He was driven with a hunger for knowledge on finding a solution for the betterment of the living conditions of his country. It was also then when he was at the university that he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union where he became a very active member. GORBACHEV’S ASCENSION TO POWER Establishing the connection between Gorbachev and Nikita Khruschchev is also the key to understanding the radical reforms. Khruschchev was a very aggressive and radical reformist in the Communist party. It is significant to compare Gorbachev to Khruschev because although they vastly differ in their pursued policies, they both share similar, if not the same, political problems. Reform-minded leaders also quite faced the same predicament when it came to the limiting of their power by opposing party-state apparat (Tompson 1993: p. 74), the Communist party in the former Soviet Union, who were pursuing opposite radical reforms. This limitation came to be very costly to both men who were put into a very weak position to put their reforms into full realization. As legacy, Khruschev’s attempts and failures of reform serve not only as an inspiration but also a cautionary tale for later reformists past his time (Sherlock 1990: p. 17). These two prominent Soviet leaders are compared precisely because of reform. For the purpose of discussion, reforms are defined as a “policy deliberately undertaken to bring about significant alteration in the authoritative allocation of values within the political system, which broadens access to the sources and instruments of power and authority, but which nevertheless preserves the continuity and identity of the regime” (Tompson 1993: p. 78). On October 1961, Khrushchev declared his plans in surpassing us in per capita production within twenty years. Gorbachev was then beginning his ascension in power in the Communist party. In 1970, he became one of the youngest and most promising provincial party chief in the nation because of his appointment as the First Party Secretary in a body of CPSU. He continued his field and participation in agriculture by becoming the Central Committee’s Secretary in the capacity of agriculture (Gorbachev 1996: p. 36). He was very aggressive in reorganizing the collective farms by improving the living conditions of the workers, expanding their private lot sizes, and giving them greater voice in the planning and development of agriculture. For the years to come, he had a very steady rise to power. Because of the positions he held for the CPSU, he became very much exposed of the political and social status of many countries abroad because of his travels. This vastly affected how he came to view the economic standing of Russia in a broader perspective and gave him more profound philosophies regarding politics and society (Gorbachev 1996: p. 40). By the 1980s, the CSPU experienced a rapid change in leadership because of the death of Andropov in ’84 and his successor, Chernenko, died the year after. This paved way for the young Gorbachev to ascend and be elected as the General Secretary by the Politburo, where he was then the youngest member. It was then in this position that he would forever change the landscape of the economy of Russia by introducing his much criticized reforms; the Perestroika and Glasnost. THE PERESTROIKA It can be argued that Gorbachev knew that modernization in the Soviet society was held back by many issues (Mcnair et al. 2005: p. 3). He had conviction that the USSR could overcome these issues. This move was practically spurred by what he has witnessed and encountered throughout his life. He believed that by reverting back to Leninism and introducing major societal and economic reforms would solve the problems. He sought in reshaping the political dynamics of the CSPU, believing that in order for the other changes to be put into action, a change of leadership style would also be needed. When he took office, the Soviet economy was in the period of economic stagnation for already two decades (Graham 2005: p. 3). His only aspiration in the reforms was to make the nation more efficient. It was apparent that not only was the Soviet Union having serious economic deficiencies in their supply but they also lagged behind technologically. To quote Gorbachev, he said that “It was clear that cosmetic repairs and patching would not do; major overhaul was required” (Gorbachev 1988: p. 27). THE POLITICAL REFORMS One of the ways that Gorbachev thought of in order to instigate change was to allow more involvement with the people and make them more excited about life in a matter that they feel that their contributions are significant and affects the whole Soviet Union (Lewin 1991: p. 126). He, thus, targeted to reform the political structure of the CPSU. He insisted and appealed for the democratization of the party in the hope to rejuvenate the party with more progressive personnel who would be able to carry out his other reforms (Brown 2007: p. 322). The old system did not promote a healthy discourse with the citizens thus disabling the citizens to have a real voice to address their plight (Merridale & Ward 1991: p. 91). Gorbachev managed then to gradually separate the government apparatus from the party bodies primarily because of the multi-candidate election reform. Party control on the government was greatly reduced. This marked the end of the force of the CSPU as the supreme power in the Soviet center and this also resulted with the nationalities of the constituents trying harder to pull away and even break-off from the union. This move made Gorbachev unpopular to the older party members which felt threatened, and with good reason, that power and authority will slip from them. The Economic Reforms Gorbachev passed a called Law on State Enterprise which stated that the state enterprises were of their own liberty to decide on their output levels of production. While the primary concern was still in addressing and fulfilling state orders, they were given freedom to dispose of the remaining output on where they saw it fit. This reform would be regarded as the most radical among the economic reforms for it also allowed private ownership of business (Brooks 1988: p. 1). He devised reforms wherein farm lands were leased to the farmers, where before all lands were owned by the government. His program also eliminated the monopoly of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. This move was made to address the very flawed way the Soviet dealt with internal trade before; with a very minimal and lacking contact between the Soviet end users and the suppliers and also the foreign partners. He also allowed foreign investors in the form of joint ventures in ministries, state enterprises, and cooperatives (Brooks 1988: p. 1). FAILURE OF THE REBUILDING Now, the big mystery would then be why the period of rebuilding failed so miserably when it carried very sound logic and good intentions. Many of his reforms backfired for the Soviet Union. In opening the Soviet Union for foreign investors, it allowed private enterprises to open which were not really in the best interest of the country. A prime example of this is the opening of McDonalds in Moscow where the prices were even out of reach for the average person (Graham 2005: p. 2). Many also believed that the reforms were a little too late in order to revive the Soviet Economy. By1991, their economy suffered dramatically when the prices sky rocketed which then snowballed into panic buying and then ultimately resulted to the fall of the USSR. The elimination of the central power over production decisions also backfired, leading to the breakdown of the traditional relationship of supply and demand and it did not contribute in forming new supply and demand relationships. Ultimately, it just caused new production bottlenecks and problems. CONCLUSION The author stands firm that Gorbachev had a clear idea on what he was doing and an even clearer one on what he wanted to achieve. The economy was already in a very bad and declining shape when Gorbachev took office. Despite all the hope and promising reforms that he managed to conjure, it was inevitable that their economy would collapse. The whole structure of the Union was not ready then for such radical reforms; rather it only slowed the inevitable. While Gorbachev achieved several significant changes in his tenure, it was not enough to uplift Russia. Thus, in the end, he lost favor with the people. His early life struggles vastly influenced how he came to be so driven for reform and societal empowerment. He lived the horrors of the Soviet nightmare during the world war and its aftermath thereafter. Not only has he has been so well immersed into a defunct and obsolete system, but he has also been the very victim of such. Through his rise in the communist regime, he has valiantly represented the common interest and gave voice to the concerns of the masses. Most will only view his efforts as what it is; a failure. A spade is a spade, and in the end all that really matters are the results. Yes, he failed, and in such a miserable fashion at that; bringing further down Russia’s economy. But would Russia’s economy fared any better had he not acted on radically changing it? With the kind of system they had, it was really bound to go nowhere but south. The people responsible for their plight were still the ones running the show. Old men with outdated and outclassed ideas were still dominating the show. Gorbachev knew what he was doing. It was only either to accept that the crisis will just constantly and continually slope to its doom, or instill radical and revolutionary reforms to change the status quo. He chose the latter. Again, yes, he failed. But he chose to go down fighting, and in the end taking the blame for what decades of failure has availed Mother Russia. But despite the result, he will still be remembered as the kind of man who braved a rigid system to make a difference and liberate the society and its people. Bibliography Brooks, Karen M. (1998). The Law on Cooperatives, Retail Food Prices, and the Farm Financial Crisis in the USSR. University of Minnesota, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Brown, Archie. (2007). The Gorbachev Era. The Cambridge History of Russia: The Twentieth Century, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 336. Graham, James. (2005). Perestroika and the Soviet Economy. Available from http://www.historyorb.com/russia/perestroika.shtml Graham, Loren R. (1988). Gorbachev’s Great Experiment. European Economic Community. RPI Center for Science, Technology and Policy, pp. 23-32. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1996). Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, p. 36. Gorbachev, Mikhail. (1987). Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Harper and Row, New York. Gorbachev, Mikhail (2006). Manifesto for the Earth: action now for peace, global justice and a sustainable future. Clairview Books. p. 10. Heuvel, Katrina Vanden & Stephen F. Cohen (2009). Gorbachev on 1989. Retrieved from thenation.com Ikeda, Daisaku & Mikhail Gorbachev. (2005). Moral lessons of twentieth century: Buddhism and Communism. I.B. Tauris, p. 11. Kliesch, Christian. (1998) To what extent was Gorbachev’s Responsible for the fall of the USSR 1991? History Coursework. Lewin, Moshe. (1991). The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation. University of California Press. Mcnair, Ronald E. et al. (2005). Gorbachev, Perestroika and Glasnost: An evaluation of Aspirations and Tribulations. University of Winconsin-Milwaukee. Merridale, Catherine & Ward, Chris. (1991). The Historical Perspective: Perestroika. Routledgem Chapman and Hall, Inc., New York. Tompson, W.J. (1993). Kruschev and Gorbachev as Reformers: A Comparison. British Journal of Political Science. 5 (1) October, pp. 77-105. Sherlock, Thomas. (1990). Khrushchev Observed. Report on the USSR. 8 June, p. 17 Read More