Soviet socialism was not the successor to developed capitalism but its alternative. Instead of inheriting a developed economy and a mature democracy, Soviet power was faced with a relatively underdeveloped industrial infrastructure and a society that had barely tasted of the cup of democracy before it was dashed away. Perestroika initially appeared to prove that systemic change was possible in the Soviet system, but as the contradiction between the aim of reviving Soviet socialism and the pressure for a more open-ended form of political evolution became ever stronger, it ended up demonstrating the opposite – rather than saving the system, reform proved its gravedigger. The system appeared to lack evolutionary potential, a mechanism that would have allowed the enormous changes in society wrought by the regime itself to modify the political superstructure.