Quick questions on Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika 1985-1989: HSC Modern History Cold War

By the early 1980s the Soviet system was in deep stagnation (zastoi). Annual growth had fallen from 5 per cent in the 1960s to about 2 per cent in the 1970s and below 2 per cent in the early 1980s. Oil and gas (now generating 60 per cent of export earnings) made the economy hostage to commodity prices; the 1986 collapse of oil to about $10 per barrel removed the rentier cushion. Military spending consumed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of GDP.

The April 1985 Plenum launched uskorenie (acceleration), an attempt to revive growth through investment in machine-building. The 27th Party Congress (25 February to 6 March 1986) introduced perestroika (restructuring) as a broader programme.

Glasnost (openness) was less a policy than a permission. Pravda and Ogonyok published criticism of past leaders; Doctor Zhivago (1988), The Children of the Arbat (1987), and Gulag Archipelago (1989) were finally published. The Chernobyl disaster (26 April 1986) tested and broke the culture of secrecy when initial denials gave way under foreign and domestic pressure to disclosure.

New Thinking (novoye myshlenie) was articulated by Gorbachev's 1987 book Perestroika and operationalised by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (replaced Andrei Gromyko, July 1985) and Politburo adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev. Core ideas: nuclear weapons made class war between systems impossible; security must be mutual; Europe was "our common European home" (Strasbourg, 6 July 1989); intervention in other socialist countries was no longer legitimate.

Reagan and Gorbachev met four times.

The Brezhnev Doctrine (Pravda, 26 September 1968) had asserted Soviet right to intervene in any socialist country threatening "the foundations of socialism." Gorbachev replaced it with what Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov dubbed (October 1989) the "Sinatra Doctrine": Eastern European states could do it "my way."

George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan on 20 January 1989. After a strategic pause and review, Bush met Gorbachev at Malta (2 to 3 December 1989), days after the Wall fell, and announced (in Gorbachev's words) that the Cold War was over. The strategic relationship moved on to German unification (Two Plus Four Treaty, 12 September 1990), the START I Treaty (31 July 1991), and the Soviet acceptance of Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991).

Robert Service's biography Gorbachev (2009) and Archie Brown's The Gorbachev Factor (1996) are standard. Vladislav Zubok's A Failed Empire (2007) and Collapse (2021) cover Soviet decline. John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War (2005) treats Gorbachev as decisive but constrained. Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted (2001) argues the Soviet collapse was uncoerced and that Reagan was peripheral.

The build-up added pressure but did not bankrupt the USSR; oil collapse and internal stagnation did.

Glasnost was cultural and political openness; perestroika was economic restructuring. Glasnost succeeded politically and destroyed the regime's legitimacy; perestroika failed economically.

8 December 1987 (signed Washington), ratified May 1988, entered force 1 June 1988.