Implications of Changes in the Soviet Union

This research examines the economic, social, and political changes which occurred in the Soviet Union, with a view towards discerning the implications for the United States (US) of these changes. In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Central Committee, and Chairman of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) Council of Defense. He was, at that time, already a member of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet. In the somewhat more than four years that he has been the nation's leader, he has introduced far reaching social, political, and economic initiatives.

In examining the contemporary developments in the Soviet Union, several factors must be considered. First, the economic initiatives of Gorbachev are not unprecedented in socialist states generally, nor in the Soviet Union in particular. The New Economic Policy (NEP) implemented by Lenin in the USSR in 1921 (Mazour, 1967) has served, in many ways, as a model for Gorbachev. Yosif Stalin terminated the NEP in 1928. In the mid1950s, Nikita Khrushchev introduced significant economic reforms in the USSR, which were terminated by Leonid Brezhnev in the mid1960s. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, both Yugoslavia and Hungary implemented economic reforms in the 1960s. Those

1 2in Hungary were curtailed to the point of death, prior to being revived in the 1980s. In 1979, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) implem

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he absence of meaningful social and political reforms. THE ECONOMIC INITIATIVES OF MIKHAIL GORBACHEV The economic initiatives of Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR have been universally applied, as they have been implemented. In this context, reforms for small businesses, as an example were implemented throughout the country at one time, and all 5decentralization prerogatives were delegated simultaneously. The incremental aspect of perestroika lies in the fact that reform for small enterprises and large enterprises, and for industry and agriculture as sectors were implemented at different times. Within a sector or industry group, however, full reform was implemented at one time. As noted in the preceding section, Grobachev has sought to introduce social and political restructuring along with economic restructuring (Medvedev, 1986). The restructuring of all types is meeting with resistance from the more conservative elements of the Party, and from members of the bureaucracy who feel threatented (Gorbachev, 1987). Nevertheless, the attempt is being made to implement social, political, and economic perestroika simultaneously in the USSR (Aganbegyan, 1987). Thus, resistance to an initiative in one sector of Soviet so

Category: Government - I