ABSTRACT
The animating principle of the legal programme of perestroika, pravovoie gosudarstvo, a call for procedural regularity in state decision-making. The collapse came virtually at once, a stunning near-simultaneous failure of a staggeringly complex societal order, leaving only a blasted hulk and a modest quantity of salvageable scrap. The emergency state had retreated to a background enforcement role for elite control, forsaking mass coercion and incarceration. The civil state was the arena of the central thrust of economic perestroika, the heart of the substantive programme. The great Delta Works protecting socialist ownership and holding off the sea of potential private interests were progressively lowered and partially dismantled. In many ways the civil law reforms under perestroika wound the clock back to the NEP, and readmitted to the economy the non-state forms permitted under the 1922 Code, the return of the banished. The Soviet vingt glorieuses preceding perestroika had witnessed progressively higher levels of social expenditure, amidst rising wages and full employment.
