The world was to be reshaped by a return to Lenin’s original vision and to the ideals of the 1917 Revolution, as well as by a rejection and a removal of Stalinist corruptions and heresies.
The Soviet citizens were unhappy with the system, as seen by the various attempts at uprising throughput the near century. Such attempts included the Novocherkassk incident in 1962, the Czechoslovakian revolt, otherwise know as Prague Spring in 1968, and the Solidarity Labour Movement in Poland in the early 1980s. The Soviet people were also becoming more and more educated, and these people were losing interest in the Socialist ideologies and it was necessary to again, “spark the interest and retain the allegiance of an educated citizenry”. Gorbachev saw that reform was therefore needed. He made plans to democratize the system and “wanted to ‘update’ and ‘modernise’ the communist system but, at the same time, to keep it indisputably communist, in vigorous competition with the West”.
Another reason that Gorbachev put Glasnost into play was because he saw that the Soviet Union was falling behind the capitalist West in terms of technology, particularly in the “computer revolution”. This was firstly embarrassing for the USSR when you consider that in the height of the Cold War, the Soviets were one of the two most technologically advanced communities in the world, and were the first country to launch a man made satellite, Sputnik, into space, and secondly, it highlighted the economic problems they were facing, no longer being able to compete effectively with the rest of the world. He needed to overcome the growth model put into play in the 1920s by Stalin, which focused on heavy industry, and replace it with a system that used modern technology and high productivity. He understood that in order to achieve this, he would, however, have to give greater freedom to the peripheral states and remove the power of the Command Economy, in which governmental planning agencies have complete control of the economy of the Soviet Union.
Glasnost had many effects upon implementation, the main and most prominent one being its aiding in the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. The carrying out of Glasnost and the democratization of the system had severely weakened the foundations of society’s beliefs in Communism. This together with the greater freedom given them by Glasnost and Gorbachev’s reforms allowed the peripheral states a chance to break free, a chance which they took. Gorbachev had aimed to introduce a system of democracy into the Communist administration. Gorbachev believed that people should have the right to choose to live in a socialist society. As a firm believer in the ideals of such a system, Gorbachev thought that in such a vote, the peoples of the Soviet would opt to remain under such an administration. However people saw that Communism in its current guise did not work and that it had not provided everything that it had promised. These people began to lose faith in the system and the regime lost its legitimacy.
It also began to revive a sense of nationalism in the USSR. In the Soviet Union at the time, there were around one hundred different ethnic groups, with twenty four of these groups consisting of at least one million people. A great number of these were discontented with the current system ad the current governance. Only because of Gorbachev letting the reigns loose, letting go the Russian grip on the peripheral states were the ethnic minorities were able to, first express their unhappiness at political levels, and secondly, act on their discontentment as seen by the “anti-Soviet and anti-Russian hatred among the Kazakhs” and the Alma Ata riot in 1986.
This heightened sense of nationalism served only to fill people with a sense of longing for their own nation states. The citizens of the USSR no longer wanted to be referred to as such, and wanted to claim back independence for their individual countries beginning with East Germany in November 1989, the Baltic Republics in 1990 and finally the declaration of the beginning of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the collapse of the USSR in December 1991.
In conclusion, Glasnost was originally implemented by Gorbachev as a means of revitalising Socialism within the Soviet Union and re-establishing it in the rest of the world as an ideology to contend with. However, the results were very different to those expected, in that the implementation of such a policy in a system like the Soviet Union, it caused the empire to topple. The main reasons for this were that people were given the freedom to opt out of the system at the same time that it highlighted ethnic tensions and revived a sense of nationalism.
Bibliography
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Dunlop, John B. (1995) The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, New Jersey, Princeton University Press
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Mazower, Mark (1999) Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, Penguin Books
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Sakwa, Richard and Anne Stevens (2000), Contemporary Europe, Hampshire, Palgrave
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Watson, William E. (1998), The Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, London, Greenwood Press
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Young, John W. and John Kent (2004), International Relations Since 1945: A Global History, New York, Oxford University Press
Richard Sakwa and Anne Stevens, Contemporary Europe, (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), p43
William E. Watson, The Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, (London: Greenwood Press, 1998) p151
Richard Sakwa and Anne Stevens, Contemporary Europe, (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000), p11
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) p40
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) p69
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) p69
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) p69
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent, (London: Penguin Books, 1999) p386
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) p256
William E. Watson, The Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, (London: Greenwood Press, 1998) p41
