ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev was selected by his peers in the leadership for the post of the Party’s General Secretary in March 1985. He came to power against major opposition and without a personal political machine to support him. Gorbachev had planned all along to accomplish this at an all-union Party conference. No Party assembly of lesser magnitude and political weight was equal to such a task. At the January 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee, Gorbachev raised the idea of convening such a conference, which is second in importance to a regular Party congress, for the first time since 1941. A young technocrat, Sergei Andreyev, described how managers sabotage government decisions. In an article in Nedelya, he called this sabotage “the braking mechanism” and outlined three ways to use it effectively. In the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, research institutes were created to study virtually every country in the world and every aspect of international relations.
