Why Soviet Economic Reform Couldn’t Save the System
Long before Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet planners and economists engaged in wide-ranging debates about economic reform. But they never seriously considered the option of a genuinely participatory, democratic model of socialism that would empower workers.
Mikhail Gorbachev and those around him were still looking for new ways to move forward. They had no idea that they would unleash a process that would lead to the system imploding as it did. (Sergei Guneyev / Getty Images)
It is now some three and a half decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. But its past continues to haunt the Left, and its experience helps to define the “short twentieth century” from 1917 to 1989–91.
Between 1917 to 1953, the territory that we think of as the Soviet Union experienced a succession of crises. Revolution and civil war gave way to a period of stability under the New Economic Policy, before the experience of collectivization and industrialization, mass repression, and Nazi invasion during the 1930s and ’40s. After victory in the war, there was a new wave of repression as Joseph Stalin became more paranoid in the final years of his rule.
But throughout this period, it was still being driven forward. Under the rule of Stalin, as Isaac Deutscher famously put it, the USSR made the transition from “a Russia working with the wooden plow” to become a land “equipped with atomic piles.” Thereafter it settled into a more peaceful pattern of development as the main enemy of the West in the Cold War.
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