11 March 1985 – The politburo of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) elects Mikhail Gorbachev as its new secretary general.
February 1985 – Gorbachev announces the start of perestroika and glasnost, a radical programme of renewal and reform.
Without dissidents we would probably live under Communism even today. Similarly, we would still live with Communism if the leadership of the USSR was not struck by the waves of change. Particularly important was the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of secretary general of the communist party (CPSU) in 1985. He was often called just “Gorbi” by the people.
The fish rots from the head. In 1985, when as many as three leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Juri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, had died within three years and the average age of the leadership was over 70 years, it was clear that something had to change. The choice fell on Gorbachev as a leader of the younger generation, who stood out as an energetic administrator and, most importantly, as a convinced communist. It was Gorbi who launched extensive reforms to renew the Soviet system, which – to the surprise of most people – ended with the collapse of Communism and the Soviet empire.
Scientists are now convinced that for revolutions to succeed, dissatisfaction among the subjects is not enough. Rulers have also to be ready for a systemic change. In the final analysis, dissidents were important, but they were not strong enough to gain power by their own means.
The younger generation of communists united by Gorbi saw the need for reform. Their experience had been different from that of the “oldies”, the Brezhnev generation. They were not indebted for their careers to Stalin but to Khrushchev, whose reign had been much more liberal than Stalin's. They wanted a thorough renovation of the Soviet-type society, not its destruction. But the result was the opposite: Gorbachev and his followers simply did not understand that the stagnated Soviet system was unreformable.
The main device in Gorbi's hand was glasnost, publicity. The criticism of the defects in the system was to stimulate people to creativity and to a stronger work ethic, put bureaucrats to work, lay the basis for a “new thinking”. Unfortunately, selective publicity did not work. People began to criticise not only the defects but the system itself. Brezhnev and Stalin were toppled from the pantheon of Soviet gods, to be followed – alas – by Lenin himself. Glasnost was thus a death sentence for Communism.