ABSTRACT
Between 1985 and 1991 the central feature of Soviet history was an increasingly far-reaching effort to rescue the country from the accumulated problems of its past. Associated with the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, these reforms were designed to revitalize a stagnant economy as well as a Communist Party grown bureaucratic and entrenched, and in so doing to preserve a redefined Soviet 'socialism' and the superpower status which the country had so recently acquired. Others have seen Gorbachev as a principled reformer, who believed that the high promise of Soviet socialism could yet be realized by peaceful evolutionary change and who felt, perhaps naively, that new democratic freedoms would bind a grateful population to the regime. The years between Brezhnev's death in November 1982 and Gorbachev's selection as general secretary in March 1985 represent an extended transition in Soviet political life. Glasnost and democratization were intended in large measure to support the centerpiece of Gorbachev's reform program, perestroika, or economic restructuring.
