1989 Reports

Soviet Political Reform in a Comparative Context

McAuley, Mary

Noone is finding it easy to keep pace with developments in today’s USSR, with the novelty and speed of the changes, the twists and turns of political struggle. Instant analysis is required; there is little time for reflection. Yet we need to stand back and put day-to-day developments within a wider context if we are to understand what is happening in the Soviet Union. Of course Gorbachev’s reform program has its own peculiarly late-1980s and Soviet features, just as the Yugoslav reforms of the early 1950s and the Czechoslovak reforms of 1968 had theirs. But at the same time, the different attempts to move away from the orthodox Stalinist model (or the “command-administrative system,” as it is now customarily called) share common features. If we are to discern what is new and different in today’s Soviet endeavor, we need to set it against other attempts within the communist world. Our focus, then, is on the reform process in Leninist regimes, and that in the Soviet Union in particular.