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 "proletariat" class. That is, founder-philosopher Karl Marx was writing about the situation in mid-19th Century Germany and England. These were rapidly urbanizing nations. In each an agrarian economy was transforming itself into an industrialized economy dependent upon, and exploiting, a large population of workers (the proletariat), skilled and unskilled alike. When Vladimir Lenin pushed communism onto the former Russian empire in the middle of World War I, the hug...