ABSTRACT
Gorbachev's perestroika, by contrast, tried to activate the masses and to create a genuinely participatory society. The regeneration perestroika aimed at contained a distinct political component, and it was in fact as a political revolution that its major success was to be achieved. Gorbachev's "predecessors" differed from him, then, in that they lacked both significant societal support and the institutional means by which such support, had it existed, could have been brought to bear upon the power-holder and the privileged. During the early 1980s Gorbachev would as a result move between two worlds: the rising star of the Politburo, the "heir apparent" was being drawn by the intractable problems of the Soviet state into the milieu of the loyal opposition. Gorbachev's revolution from within had thus proved more negative than positive: it had destroyed one political-economic system but not replaced it by another.
