ABSTRACT

For more than four years (1985–89), Mikhail Gorbachev had seized and largely held the initiative in the affairs of the Soviet Union. But in the final two years of the country’s existence, he rapidly lost that ability to shape events as the democratic, labor, and national movements, together with a growing conservative backlash against them, took center stage in defining the country’s agenda. For the first time since the revolution of 1917, society, rather than the state, was driving the process of change in Soviet life. But that society was increasingly fragmented, fractious, and polarized, pitting radical democrats against die-hard communists and nationalists of all kinds against Soviet “patriots.” In this setting Gorbachev found himself reacting to multiple and conflicting pressures in an effort, growing ever more desperate, to hold the country together. The failure of that effort provides the “story line” of the Soviet Union’s final and tumultuous two years. The political center, to which Gorbachev clung, contracted and then vanished amid the sharpening contradictions and conflicts of Soviet society. In the end, the ties that bound this sprawling country together no longer held.