The economic stagnation of the late Brezhnev era was the result of various factors: the exhaustion of easily available resources, especially raw materials, and the growing structural imbalance of the economy due to the distorting effects of the incentive system, which paralyzed initiative and dissuaded people from doing an honest day’s work. Under perestroika the economy moved from stagnation to crisis, and this deepened as time passed. Hence the policies of perestroika must carry much of the blame for the economic catastrophe that resulted. Gorbachev admitted in 1988 that the first two years had been wasted since he was unaware of the depth of the crisis when he took over. This is an extraordinary statement for a party leader to make. Either he had paid little attention to the underlying trends of the economy or no one at the top was aware of the real situation. The latter is probably more accurate, since the state planning commission, Gosplan, had no model of how the economy functioned. The Soviet gross national product (GNP) was almost stagnant during the first four years of perestroika and did not fall. Unemployment remained at about 4 percent of the labour force, almost all in the labour-surplus areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Open inflation remained low until 1989. Underlying trends, however, pointed to systemic failure. Shortages, endemic to all planned economies, became serious from the mid-1980s. By mid-1990 more than 1,000 basic consumer goods were very seldom on sale. Rationing became widespread, with most goods being sold at the point of work. Queueing became the national pastime: a 1990 estimate put it at 30–40 million man-, or rather woman-, hours a year. The only thing that was not in short supply was money. This was due to a rapidly growing budget deficit, first evident in 1987. Then the Law on State Enterprises, effective from January 1988, permitted managers to increase wages to cope with the tight labour situation. These increases were far in excess of productivity growth. The State Bank lost control of monetary growth. The plan for 1990 was a growth of 10 billion rubles, but it turned out to be about 28 billion rubles. Social benefits, amounting to about a quarter of the gross family income, were always modest by international standards. However, in 1990 they increased by 21 percent as a result of the U.S.S.R. Congress of People’s Deputies voting to increase a whole raft of benefits, noticeably pensions. Since there were no resources to meet this extra expenditure, the budget deficit grew, as did the money supply. The kolkhoz, the comparatively free market in which peasants sold their surplus produce, is a rough guide to price trends: prices between 1985 and 1988 increased by less than 1 percent annually, but in 1989 they jumped 9.5 percent and in 1990 by 29 percent.

Responsibility for the budget deficit rested fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Gorbachev leadership. Traditionally the budget deficit had been 2 or 3 percent of GNP. The years 1985 and 1986 changed all that. Gorbachev’s desire to achieve faster growth—the policy advocated by Aganbegyan, his chief economic adviser, was acceleration—resulted in the 12th Five-Year Plan (1986–90) being returned three times to Gosplan with instructions to raise targets. In 1986 the budget deficit rose to 6 percent of GNP. The Gorbachev leadership did not mention the subject in public until 1988. By then the deficit had risen to more than 10 percent. The result of all this was to throw the industrial sector into imbalance from 1985 onward. The Law on the State Enterprise further aggravated the problem.

Between 1985 and 1987 the Gorbachev leadership increased investment and defense expenditure, while at the same time state revenue was declining owing to a fall in alcohol sales and lower prices for export goods. From 1988 the situation became dire. In 1991 the economy was facing total collapse. The government found it increasingly difficult to intervene decisively. The Law on the State Enterprise reduced the power of the ministries, and simultaneously the number of officials was cut back sharply. Those who remained were overwhelmed by the work load. Since there was no effective control from Moscow, rising nationalism, ethnic strife, and regionalism fragmented the economy into dozens of mini-economies. Many republics sought independence, others sovereignty, and they all pursued policies of economic autarky. Barter was widespread. Ukraine introduced coupons, and Moscow issued ration cards.

Foreign trade suffered. Lower oil prices and economic fragmentation caused the hard currency debt to rise from U.S. $25.6 billion at the end of 1984 to about $80 billion at the end of 1991. Imports from the West were cut back sharply between 1985 and 1987. These were almost exclusively consumer goods and not capital goods, which often could not be installed. The public vented its frustration. This led to a complete reversal, and imports from the West rose by almost 50 percent between 1987 and 1989. As a consequence, by 1989 the Soviets could no longer service their hard currency debt on time.

Recalculations of Soviet economic performance by Soviet statisticians widened the gap between the Soviet and U.S. economies. The official view was that the Soviet national income was about 64 percent of the U.S. level in 1988. Gorbachev, in a speech in October 1990, implied that the real figure was about 40 percent. Another estimate put the real level at about 46 percent in 1970, declining to 40 percent in 1987.

Gorbachev received much advice on how to solve the Soviet Union’s economic crisis. There were two basic solutions: the socialist solution and the market solution. The Ryzhkov group favoured central planning, more efficient administration, and greater decision-making powers for enterprises and farms. State ownership of the means of production would continue. They called it a “regulated market economy.” The radicals, led by Stanislav Shatalin, Nikolay Petrakov, and Grigory Yavlinsky, wanted a move toward a free-market economy. This involved private ownership of enterprises, land, services, and so on. It also meant the freeing of prices. Gorbachev could not make up his mind and always tried to persuade the two groups to pool their resources and arrive at a compromise. The radicals thought they had convinced Gorbachev in the autumn of 1990 to introduce a 500-day program that would have implemented a market economy, but he changed his mind and sided with the conservatives. This was a fatal mistake. It left him without a viable economic policy, and the right felt that if they applied enough pressure he would always abandon radical solutions.

One of the reasons Gorbachev shied away from the market was price liberalization. He would not risk sharp price rises because of the fear of social unrest. Despite the abundant evidence of the seriousness of the situation in 1988, the critical year, Gorbachev and other leading communists refused to draw the necessary lessons. At the 19th Party Conference in June 1988 Leonid Abalkin pointed out that the country was still suffering from stagnation. Gorbachev and others criticized him and adopted a motion claiming that the economic decline had been halted. The election of the U.S.S.R. Congress of People’s Deputies made it virtually impossible for the Gorbachev leadership to adopt austerity measures. The popular mood was one of spend, spend, spend. Gorbachev paid only cursory attention to the economy until late 1989. A charitable explanation for this would be that he was concentrating on political reform. A less charitable one would be that he lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp the seriousness of the economic crisis. Gorbachev was never able to construct a viable economic policy or to put in place a mechanism for the implementation of economic policy.

Foreign policy

Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev was more popular abroad than at home. He proved a brilliant diplomat and for the first time bridged the gulf between a Soviet communist leader and the Western public. He was friendly, accessible, and a skilled performer on television. It was the message the West had been waiting decades to hear. His “new political thinking” consisted of removing ideology from foreign and security policy-making and arguing that all states were interdependent. If they did not unite, the whole planet would be in danger. He proposed the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 and the establishment of a system of comprehensive security, a military doctrine that stressed reasonable sufficiency and recognized the complexity of the modern world. He signaled a change in the U.S.S.R.’s attitude toward the United Nations in December 1988 when, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, he praised its role in promoting international peace and security. He announced a reduction of 500,000 in the Soviet armed forces over the following two years, including the reduction of the number of divisions in Europe and Asia, as well as pulling back many tanks. The Soviet General Staff, which exercised a monopoly over defense and security policy, was not altogether convinced of the wisdom of such a move. Throughout the Gorbachev era the General Staff was more conservative than the national leader and became bolder in its opposition as time passed. It effectively sabotaged the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

Gorbachev, ably aided by Shevardnadze, set out to end the “new Cold War” that had broken out in the late 1970s. A key reason for this was that the new leadership had come to the conclusion that the defense burden was crippling the Soviet Union.

The first Reagan-Gorbachev summit took place in Geneva in November 1985. A joint statement proposed a 50 percent reduction in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenal. The next summit took place at Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986. The Soviets came very well prepared but demanded agreement on all their points. The discussions broke down over the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI; a proposed U.S. system that would intercept attacking ballistic missiles), which the Americans were not willing to abandon. The third summit, held in Washington, D.C., in December 1987, was historic. It produced an agreement to eliminate a whole category of nuclear weapons: land-based intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. This was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, formalized by Reagan and Gorbachev at their final summit in Moscow in May–June 1988. Serious differences still existed, however, especially over verification of the implementation of the treaties. Reagan and Gorbachev did not discuss SDI at the Washington and Moscow summits: the Soviets had made their stand at Reykjavík and lost.

One of the agreements reached at the Geneva summit concerned the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The last soldier left in February 1989. Brezhnev had blundered into Afghanistan, and the U.S.S.R. had paid a heavy price in soldiers (almost 14,000), matériel, and foreign hostility.

Relations between Gorbachev and Reagan’s successor, George Bush, were good, and there were several summits. These produced two historic agreements: the CFE treaty, signed in November 1990, and the START treaty, signed in July 1991. But opposition by the Soviet General Staff undermined the CFE Treaty, and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in August 1991 halted progress on the START treaty. The new relationship between the superpowers resulted in Shevardnadze voting for military action against Iraq in the UN. This was painful for Moscow, because Iraq had been an ally.

Gorbachev was a hit everywhere he went in Europe. This was especially so in West Germany, where he received a rapturous welcome in 1989. In eastern Europe the tumultuous events of 1989 were possible because Gorbachev did not permit the intervention of the military to keep communist regimes in power. He promoted perestroika in the region, believing that it would benefit socialism. He undermined Erich Honecker in East Germany and accelerated the collapse of that country. He was opposed to the unification of Germany but was forced in the end to accept it.

Gorbachev’s visit to China in 1989 was almost a fiasco and deeply disturbed the Chinese leadership. Many Chinese were attracted to perestroika, but the aged leadership ruthlessly suppressed those calling for political reform.

One of the objects of Soviet foreign policy had been to strengthen socialism around the world. By 1990 it was abundantly clear that this mission had failed. The U.S.S.R.’s only allies were underdeveloped Third World states such as Angola, Ethiopia, and Cuba. These were all liabilities, requiring more and more aid to stay afloat.