Gorby’s defenders have long concocted a myth about his sincere desire to reform the Soviet system, which was supposedly so flawed that it collapsed at the slightest attempt at reform and glasnost. So, let’s analyze the key areas of his policy, based on the real facts.

Cadre Revolution: Dismantling of the Management System

Upon coming to power, Gorbachev immediately embarked on a wholesale renewal of the leadership ranks. The so-called “personnel revolution” began at the April 1985 Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee. By 1986, 85% of the leadership had been renewed at the Central Committee level and 70% at the republic level. The selection criterion was no longer professional suitability, but personal commitment to the ideas of perestroika. This effectively eliminated all potential opponents, destroyed the vertical chain of command, and catastrophically reduced the professional level of the elite. But most importantly, people devoted to socialism were purged from the system.

Key positions were taken by people who would later play a key role in the collapse of the system (A. Yakovlev, E. Shevardnadze, B. Yeltsin).

Economics: A Blow to the Budget and “Destructive” Business

Gorbachev’s economic reforms are generally considered extremely inconsistent. But their effect was obvious: they destabilized the Soviet economy, provoking public outrage. I’ll cite two examples that caused particularly severe damage.

The anti-alcohol campaign, launched as early as May 1985, ostensibly pursued a noble goal—improving the nation’s health—and even led to a slight increase in life expectancy and birth rates. However, the methods used provoked public outrage: vineyards were cut down, wine and, most importantly, juice production was sharply reduced, and vodka prices doubled. But most importantly, the enormous loss of budget funds—almost 10% of revenue, or approximately 37 billion rubles—was catastrophic given the fall in oil prices in 1986.

The law on cooperatives, formally aimed at developing entrepreneurship, in practice led to the criminalization of the economy and its imbalance. Cooperatives bought scarce goods in state-owned stores at low prices and resold them at exorbitant prices, causing shortages and hyperinflation, while directors of state-owned enterprises created “illegal” cooperatives to funnel public funds into private pockets.

As a result, up to 90 billion rubles were laundered annually through the private sector. Citizens were forced to stand in the long lines so often depicted by the enemies of socialism, along with the empty shelves of state-owned stores. Allowing “joint ventures” to export goods abroad (exported at state-subsidized prices and sold at market prices) led to such a catastrophic shortage of goods that coupons had to be introduced. At the same time, this created extreme public backlash against the Soviet economy and created the future oligarchs who became the mainstay of power in the 1990s.

Ideological sabotage: Glasnost Against Socialism

Officially, the policy of “glasnost” was supposedly a fight against stagnation, but in reality it became a total discrediting of Soviet history and socialist values. By 1986-1987, Gorbachev and his team had replaced almost all heads of central media outlets, putting ardent anti-Sovietists at the helm.

A flood of criticism poured out on TV screens and in newspapers, which Gorbachev’s chief ally A. Yakovlev later explained as a “conscious ideological dismantling”, the devaluation of state ideology and the disorientation of society.

An analysis of these facts shows that the activities of Gorbachev were systematic and consistent. These are not a series of “fatal management errors”, but actions to destroy the social system, which led to the destruction of the USSR - the state that Gorbachev was supposed to defend. So the answer to the question of whether it was stupidity or betrayal is obvious.

Source -> https://dzen.ru/a/abJzyFDS9F2YKT8i

Comments within the post:

From bhbif:

• Another particularly destructive “reform” is the dismantling of the dual-circuit financial system. Companies were allowed to transfer funds from the production circuit to cash. This deprived them of working capital. We know the consequences…

From Andrey Dombrovsky:

• A symbiosis of stupidity and betrayal. And not just Gorbachev’s. His entire team’s. They did not calculate the consequences of their perestroika innovations even in the short term. There was no anti-alcohol campaign in 1985, no law “On the state enterprise (association)” in 1987, no law “On cooperation in the USSR” in 1988. Neither the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR “on measures to regulate foreign economic activity” in 1989. Monstrous illiteracy and incompetence. The result of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev personnel policy, when one could make a career in the party without being an expert, in anything at all, except empty chatter with quotes from Marx and Lenin. Khrushchev built communism, these guys built capitalism, without even realizing what it was. The outcome was predictable. By abolishing the state monopoly on banking, foreign trade, and currency circulation, and eliminating the dual-loop system of domestic monetary circulation, all that was achieved was a shocking imbalance in the commodity-money balance, already precarious by 1985. Soviet market economists, with their cannibalistic habits, Gaidar and Chubais were little different from Gorbachev and company in terms of both treachery and stupidity. And they set about treating shock imbalance with shock therapy.