ABSTRACT
The advent of the last General Secretary of the Central Committee was accompanied by a radical reconsideration of policy and a declaration of democratic reform. In practice, this new way, to which Mikhail Gorbachev gave the beautiful name of 'perestroika', drew a line under the history of the USSR, and stimulated the centrifugal process of the destruction of the state, which ended not only in the fall of the largest empire in the world but in the crash of the whole Eastern European socialist system. It was quite natural that this revolution in politics and ideology left its mark on all spheres of the country's activity, and on the consciousness of the people.
