ABSTRACT
When Mikhail S. Gorbachev was elected the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985, he became leader of one of two world superpowers. Less than a year after becoming General Secretary, Gorbachev issued a call for “radical reform” to overcome a “crisis of stagnation,” later winning approval for his program for restructuring the Soviet political economy at the January 1987 Central Committee plenum. More important than the correct identification of Gorbachev was the fact that Sovietologists were well aware of the accumulating problems the Soviet Union was facing in mid-1985. In reading the Sovietological debate about the likelihood of reform in the period leading up to Gorbachev’s arrival in power and his early years in office, one encounters frequent references to modifiers such as “systemic,” “structural,” “institutional,” “fundamental,” “radical,” etc.
