ABSTRACT
The radical reforms have considerable if often unexpected effects. At home the reforms produce unprecedented liberalization of politics; growing tensions within the state, within the society, and between the regime and the society; and little in the way of needed structural changes in the economy. This chapter provides an explanation for the many surprising parallels and draws on some implications for the study of both international relations in general and the Gorbachev period in particular. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that major reforms are quite rare historical events—except, it must be noted, in the Russian and Soviet cases. Such reforms have what would appear to be contradictory requirements. Thus great reforms seem to require, oddly enough, a system that promotes stagnation and yet is well suited for innovation. But both tsarism and state socialism seemed to be such systems. There are two factors, more systemic in nature, that seem to have encouraged Alexander II and Gorbachev to introduce major reform.
