ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some answers to the paradoxical nature of the reforms that Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev instituted and analyze their consequences for post-Soviet Russia. Paradoxically, however, the adoption of socialist policies within the Soviet Union created a vast class of consumers and property owners located in urban areas whose aspirations became increasingly individualistic and market oriented with time. According to many experts, a modern Soviet civil society produced Gorbachev and made his reforms both necessary and possible. While acknowledging the many deficiencies of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev, however, had no intention of surrendering wholesale to the free market. Gorbachev penitently admitted that the Communist Party, by cutting itself off from its own constituencies, had fostered a culture of secrecy and subservience where people were both cynical and afraid to take responsibility. Gorbachev and his idealistic cohort realized to their bitter cost that truth telling was neither sufficiently therapeutic nor politically expedient.
