ABSTRACT
By the early 1980s crisis symptoms were everywhere apparent. The country faced new economic challenges provoked by advanced modernisation, and political challenges stimulated by the effective extended political exclusion of the mass of the people. Life within the party itself had become formalised and dull, while the soviets were bureaucratised and lifeless. Responses to the crisis were at first partial, stressing notions like ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie), ‘openness’ (glosnost) and ‘restructuring’ (perestroikd), before more global approaches began to emerge exatnining the problems facing the Soviet Union in terms of ‘systemic crisis’ and problems of civilisational integration. Towering over this last period is the personality of the USSR’s last leader, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who was elected General Secretary of the party in March 1985.
