Gorbachev's Leadership & Economic Reform
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If economics is a social science, then the reform era of Mikhail Gorbachev was doomed from the beginning: in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics economics was a political ideology (Smith, 1990, p. 13). Driven by economic necessity rather than an inclination for democratic government, Gorbachev, the final General Secretary of the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union for all practical purposes, initiated a series of programs that had as their intention the purpose of reviving the nation's economy. The reforms he instituted - under the mantles of "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness) - were planned as gradual retoolings of the existing communist system (Smith, p. 15). Communism, the Marxist alloy of socialist economic theory combined with proletarian-oriented democracy, had never really been tried in the U.S.S.R.; rather, it had become the victim of a bureaucracy of terror institutionalized by the brutal dictator Josef Stalin. What Mikhail Gorbachev failed to realize, as he went about attempting to set the his nation's communist system to rights again, was that the tools of Soviet economic analysis he employed were corrupted by bureaucracy and ideology to the point that they were useless (Campbell, 1988, pp. 44-46). This paper will examine that economic environment and how Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership was not up to the task of reforming it.The Marxist theory behind a communist economy is based upon the premise that there is a "prolet
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short-lived defender of the Old Guard. That the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disintegrated under his tenure of command attests to his ultimate failure. The Soviet Union has been replaced by the independent nation of Russia and seventeen smaller, independent countries; and Gorbachev has been replaced by Boris Yeltsin, former protege, ousted rival and, finally, defender. As it was the leadership of Lenin and Stalin that put the Soviet structure into place, it is appropriate to compare how the failed leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev determined that structure's demise.
"Leadership" - in the former Soviet Union and the current independent Republic of Russia - is a term that has only recently taken on a comparative meaning. Prior to the helmsmanship of Nikita Khrushchev (1953-64), the country was led by the institution of the Czarist empire (died 1917), then by the "cults of personality" centered around Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin ending in 1953 (Heller & Nekrich, 1986, pp. 733-757). In the former case, imperial leadership was primarily exercised via bureaucratic momentum (or non-momentum as World War I disastrously proved). Since that era, after the brief establishing rule of Lenin was succeeded by the 27-year dictato
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet Union, Loory Imse, Boris Yeltsin, War II, Khrushchev Brezhnev, Union Gorbachev's, Party Whatever, Five-Year Plan, Heller Nekrich, soviet union, mikhail gorbachev, boris yeltsin, soviet system, world war, soviet economy, russian republic, communist party, loory imse, central government, union soviet socialist, parks gerstenzang 1991, former russian empire, york summit books, soviet socialist republics,
Approximate Word count = 3737
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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