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³ See, for example, Zubkova, E. Ya., ‘Uroki nezavershennykh povorotov 1956 i 1965 godov’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 4 (04 1988)Google Scholar; Openkin, L. A., ‘Byli li povoroty v razvitii sovetskogo obshchestva v 50-kh i 60-kh godakh?’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 8 (08 1988)Google Scholar; and Popov, Gavriil, ‘Dva tsveta vremeni, ili uroki Khrushcheva’, Ogonek, 42 (10 1989), p. 14.Google Scholar

⁴ This definition, as well as much of the discussion which follows, draws heavily on Gustafson. See Gustafson, Thane, Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. ix–x.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The phrase ‘authoritative allocation of values’ is David Easton's; for an examination of its meaning and implications, see Easton, David, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 129–34.Google Scholar

⁵ Whitefield, Stephen, ‘Soviet Industrial Ministries as Political Institutions’ (doctoral thesis, Oxford University, 1991), p. 25.Google Scholar

⁶ The use of the term ‘regime’ in this discussion is quite deliberate. My analysis will proceed in terms of the Soviet regime rather than (as is the case with many similar discussions) the Soviet political system. Although the two phrases are sometimes used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Unlike political systems, regimes are ‘wilful human agglomerations that actively implement policies’ and are capable of pursuing aims and of identifying and reacting to threats to their survival (Motyl, Alexander, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity and Stability in the USSR (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. x).Google Scholar Focusing on the regime (on the actions and interests of individuals, groups and real institutions) rather than on the political system as a unit of analysis is intended to reduce the tendency towards over-abstraction.

⁷ Pravda, 13 01 1988Google Scholar; Gleason, Gregory, Federalism and Nationalism: The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990), pp. 5–6, 108, 130.Google Scholar

⁸ Gustafson, , Reform in Soviet Politics, p. x.Google Scholar

⁹ Masculine pronouns are used throughout this article when referring to a hypothetical reforming leader; this is done solely for the sake of economy of expression.

¹⁰ Stepan, Alfred, ‘State Power in the Southern Cone of Latin America’, in Evans, Peter B. et al. , eds, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 319–20ff.Google Scholar

¹¹ Whitefield, , Soviet Industrial Ministries, p. 17.Google Scholar

¹² Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

¹³ This is a simplification of William Riker's scheme of side payments; see The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 109–13.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Starr, S. Frederick, ‘The Road to Reform’, in Brumberg, Abraham, ed., Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western-Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 22.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Azrael, Jeremy, ‘Varieties of de-Stalinization’, in Johnson, Chalmers, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 135–51, at p. 142.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Khrushchev, for example, privately acknowledged guilt for his role in the crimes of the Stalin era; see ‘Problemy istorii i sovremennosti’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 2 (02 1989), p. 53.Google Scholar Gorbachev would appear to have felt genuine revulsion at the stagnation, corruption and injustice of the system of which he was a part; see Pravda, 20 05 1987, p. 1.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Niemi, Richard G., ‘Coalitions’, in Kuper, J., ed., Political Science and Political Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 25–7, at p. 26.Google Scholar

¹⁸ This is one of the reasons for rejecting accounts of Khrushchev's leadership like Carl Linden's, which treat Khrushchev as an embattled reformer fighting a losing struggle against the neo-Stalinists who surround him; matters were far more complicated than Linden's account implies. See Linden, Carl A., Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).Google Scholar For a critique of Linden's views, see Tompson, W. J., ‘Nikita Khrushchev and the Territorial Apparatus, 1953–1964’ (doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1991), pp. 284–90.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Sakwa, Richard, Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1985–1990 (Deddington, Oxon: Philip Allan, 1990), p. 40.Google Scholar

²⁰ Gustafson, , Reform in Soviet Politics, p. x.Google Scholar

²¹ See, for example, Openkin, L. A., ‘Na istoricheskom pereput'e’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1 (01 1990)Google Scholar and Zubkova, E. Ya., ‘Khrushchev, Malenkov i “ottepel'”’, Kommunist, 9 (09 1990).Google Scholar

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²³ Gill, Graeme, ‘Khrushchev and Systemic Development’, in McCauley, Martin, ed., Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 30–45, at p. 33.Google Scholar

²⁴ Hill, Ronald, ‘The CPSU in the 1990s’ (lecture given at St Antony's College, Oxford, 29 10 1990).Google Scholar

²⁵ It would appear, however, that the 1953 leaders harboured such fears, at least in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death. See Openkin, , ‘Na istoricheskom pereput'e’, p. 109Google Scholar, which hints at this. The tone of the leadership's pronouncements at the time of Stalin's death also suggested such a fear (see Pravda, 5–7 03 1953Google Scholar) as did their reactions to Beria's activities. See ‘Delo Beriia’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1 & 2 (01 and 02 1991).Google Scholar

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²⁷ Anecdotal evidence suggests that this enhanced the authority of local as well as central party leaders over the KGB (Karaulov, A., Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), p. 32).Google Scholar

²⁸ Breslauer, George, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 40.Google Scholar See also Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, pp. 15, 17.Google Scholar

²⁹ Stalin's nocturnal habits meant that state and party administrators often had to work extraordinarily long, late and irregular hours; failure to be in one's office when needed could be dangerous. As a result, the decree on working hours both improved administrators' quality of life and eased the pressure on them (Medvedev, R., N. S. Khrushchev: polilicheskaya biografiia (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), pp. 74–5Google Scholar; Adzhubei, Aleksei, ‘Krushenie nadezhd: Khrushchev, kakim ya ego pomniu’ (unpublished manuscript, 1991), pp. 139–40.Google Scholar

³⁰ Azrael, , ‘Varieties of de-Stalinization’, p. 146Google Scholar; Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, pp. 14–17, especially p. 14.Google Scholar

³¹ Tompson, , ‘Khrushchev and the Territorial Apparatus’, pp. 257–60.Google Scholar

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³³ For a discussion of the implications of this shift in the regime's legitimation strategy for Soviet political life, see Miller, John, ‘The Communist Party: Trends and Problems’, in Brown, Archie and Kaser, Michael, eds, Soviet Policy for the 1980s (London: Macmillan, 1982). pp. 1–34, at pp. 1ffGoogle Scholar; also Zubkova, , ‘Khrushchev, Malenkov i “ottepel'”’, p. 87.Google Scholar

³⁴ Breslauer, George, ‘Khrushchev Reconsidered’, Problems of Communism, 25, no. 5 (09–10 1976), 18–33, p. 23.Google Scholar

³⁵ Breslauer, , ‘Khrushchev Reconsidered’, p. 24.Google Scholar

³⁶ ‘Posle plenuma. Smeshchenie Khrushcheva: versiia dlya partaktiva’, Kommunist, 4 (03 1991), p. 110.Google Scholar

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³⁸ Sakwa, , Gorbachev and His Reforms, p. 29.Google Scholar

³⁹ Breslauer, , Khrushchev and Brezhnev, p. 76.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Gorbachev in fact began pressing for political reform in 1985, but little headway was made until the January 1987 CC plenum. The fact that this plenum met only after three postponements attests to the strength of the opposition to this line of reform. See Gooding, John, ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, Soviet Studies, 42 (1990), 195–231, p. 206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴¹ The Group of Seven's Plaza Accord of 1985 had a devastating effect on Soviet hard currency trade. Most Soviet exports were denominated in dollars, while imports tended to be in Deutschmarks; thus the fall in the dollar and the strengthening of the Deutschmark engineered by the G7 accord greatly weakened the Soviet Union's external accounts position. See Newman, Paul, ‘The USSR: A Banking and Financial Perspective’ (paper given at St Antony's College, Oxford, 14 05 1990).Google Scholar

⁴² Gooding, , ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, p. 197.Google Scholar

⁴³ John Gooding has traced the disappearance of all references to communism from Gorbachev's discourse; see, Gooding, , ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, pp. 200–2.Google Scholar The link between the communist ideal and the CPSU's claim to power has been set out by T. H. Rigby; see Rigby, T. H., ‘Conclusion: The Gorbachev Era Launched’, in Miller, R. F., Miller, J. H. and Rigby, T. H., eds, Gorbachev at the Helm: A New Era in Soviet Politics? (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 235–46.Google Scholar

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⁴⁷ The phrase is Hough, 's (‘Gorbachev's Endgame’, p. 244).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Reddaway, Peter, ‘The Quality of Gorbachev's Leadership’Google Scholar, in Hewett, and Winston, , eds, Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka, pp. 431–45, at pp. 431, 434.Google Scholar

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⁵⁰ Sakwa, , Gorbachev and His Reforms, pp. 31–3.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Some recent Soviet observers have implied or argued that Khrushchev failed in part because he was not democratic enough. See Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, pp. 16–17Google Scholar; Openkin, , ‘Na istoricheskom pereput'e’, pp. 52–65.Google Scholar

⁵² Sakwa, , Gorbachev and His Reforms, p. 39.Google Scholar

⁵³ Breslauer, , Khrushchev and Brezhnev, pp. 2–8.Google Scholar

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⁵⁹ Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, p. 14.Google Scholar

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⁶³ See, for example, Mikhailov, N., ‘Vozmozhen li segodnya Oktyabr' 1964 goda?’ Moskovskaya pravda, 18 08 1989, p. 2Google Scholar; Medvedev, R., ‘N. S. Khrushchev: 1964 god: Neozhidannoe smeshchenie’, in Aksiutin, Yu. V., ed., N. S. Khrushchev: Materialy k biografii (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), p. 199Google Scholar; Zubkova, E., ‘Oktyabr' 1964 goda: povorot ili perevorot?’ Kommunist, 13 (09 1989), pp. 93–4Google Scholar; Khrushchev, Sergei, Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1990) pp. 70–2, 75–6Google Scholar; Adzhubei, Aleksei, ‘Te desyat' let’, Znamya, 7 (07 1988), p. 130.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Miller, , ‘The Communist Party: Trends and Problems’, p. 1.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Reddaway, , ‘The Quality of Gorbachev's Leadership’Google Scholar, in Hewett, and Winston, , eds, Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroyka, p. 432.Google Scholar

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⁶⁷ Barsukov, , ‘Kak byl “nizlozhen”’, p. 125.Google Scholar

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⁶⁹ The reforming or transforming leader who sees a crisis before it actually occurs often faces great difficulties in generating a sense of urgency about the need for drastic action. See Tichy, Noel. M. and Devanna, Mary Ann, The Transformational Leader (New York: Wiley, 1986), pp. 29, 46–7.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Pravda, 23 08 1991, p. 2.Google Scholar

⁷¹ It is also likely that, after the coup, Gorbachev believed that resistance to reform within the party had been broken and that he could at last reform it into a social democratic party which would be dependent on him.

⁷² Jerry Hough has argued that much of Gorbachev's unwillingness to break decisively with the bureaucrats reflected his awareness that, in the long run, the bureaucrats would be his best friends, because there would be no satisfying the intellectuals. See Hough, Jerry, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 177–9.Google Scholar

⁷³ Gorbachev in early 1989 called on the intelligentsia to stop bickering and rally around perestroika (Pravda, 8 01 1989, pp. 2–4)Google Scholar. In Gorbachev's references to the intelligentsia's ‘responsibility to the people’ and the ‘distressed, bewildered, indignant’ mood of public opinion, John Gooding detects both a overt appeal and an implied threat (Gooding, , ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, pp. 224–5).Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Gorbachev also benefited from the fact that there was far more reformist thought/dialogue prior to 1985 than there had been prior to 1953. Many of the most important ideas of the perestroika period were developed by Soviet scholars and dissidents during the ‘years of stagnation’. See Starr, , ‘The Road to Reform’, pp. 17–29Google Scholar; Brown, Archie, ‘New Thinking on the Political System’, in Brown, Archie, ed., New Thinking in Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 12–28, at especially pp. 12–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁵ Sakwa, , Gorbachev and His Reforms, p. 50.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ At the April 1991 Central Committee plenum, a number of party leaders both harshly criticized Gorbachev and yet were remarkably frank in admitting that the party still needed him. See Pravda, 25 04 1991, pp. 1–2Google Scholar; 26 April 1991, p. 3; 27 April 1991, pp. 1–4; and 29 April 1991, p. 3.

⁷⁷ Whitefield has argued that they were the dominant political actors; see Whitefield, , Soviet Industrial Ministries.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Katz, Abraham, The Politics of Economic Reform in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 62.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Tatu, , Power in the Kremlin, pp. 284–5Google Scholar. There is some evidence that Khrushchev was moving towards acceptance of a genuinely economic reform before his fall but nothing of the sort was adopted until after his ouster (Khrushchev, , Khrushchev on Khrushchev, pp. 18–19).Google Scholar

⁸⁰ These included the strengthening of systems of state control, the creation and subsequent strengthening of all-union State Committees, the reorganization of the economic councils themselves and the creation of all-union economic councils, and the strengtheining of the Soviet State Planning Committee. See Tompson, , ‘Khrushchev and the Territorial Apparatus’, pp. 227–57.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Personnel changes in Central Asia and elsewhere were geared to restoring central authority in areas which had been allowed under Brezhnev virtually to pass beyond the control of the centre. A number of union-republican ministries were shifted to all-union status (Nahaylo, Bohdan and Swoboda, Victor, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), pp. 279–80).Google Scholar

⁸² Breslauer, , Khrushchev and Brezhnev, pp. 50, 55Google Scholar; Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, p. 14.Google Scholar

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⁸⁴ Breslauer, , ‘Evaluating Gorbachev’, pp. 407–10Google Scholar; Tichy, and Devanna, , The Transformational Leader, chap. 1.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ See Pravda and Izvestiia, 1 12 1990, p. 4.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Pravda, 1 12 1990, p. 4Google Scholar; italics added.

⁸⁷ Gooding, , ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, p. 197.Google Scholar

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⁸⁹ Indeed, long after the coup, Gorbachev expressed his view that Lenin's revolution might have led to true socialism and democracy had it not been for Stalin, 's ThermidorGoogle Scholar; see Gorbachev, Mikhail. S., The August Coup (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 121.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Gooding, , ‘Perestroika as Revolution from Within’, p. 53.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Popov, , ‘Dva tsveta vremeni’, p. 15.Google Scholar

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⁹⁴ For an account of his fall, see Tompson, W J., ‘The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev’, Soviet Studies, 43 (1991), 1101–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a discussion of the apparat's role specifically, see Tompson, , ‘Khrushchev and the Territorial Apparatus’, pp. 257–60.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ Gustafson, Thane and Mann, Dawn, ‘Gorbachev's First Year: Building Power and Authority’, Problems of Communism, 35, No. 3 (03–06 1986), 1–19, at pp. 2–6Google Scholar; Gustafson, and Mann, , ‘Gorbachev's Next Gamble’, Problems of Communism, 36, No. 4 (07–08 1987), 1–20, at pp. 12–18.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ Gustafson, and Mann, , ‘Gorbachev's Next Gamble’, p. 5.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Hough, described him as ‘modernizing westernizing Czar’Google Scholar on the model of Ataturk, Lee Kuan Yew and other Third World autocrats (Hough, , ‘Understanding Gorbachev’, p. 477).Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Gooding, , ‘Gorbachev and Democracy’, pp. 212, 217.Google Scholar

⁹⁹ Migranyan, Andranik has described this ‘steering crisis’Google Scholar which characterized post-1953 Soviet politics in terms similar to Popov's (Migranyan, A., ‘Mekhanizm tormozheniia v politicheskoi sisteme i puti ego preodoleniia’, in Afanas'ev, Yurii, ed., Inogo ne dano (Moscow: Progress, 1988), pp. 105–7.Google Scholar

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¹⁰¹ The most prominent of the latter group was the historian Andranik Migranyan; see his ‘Dolgii put' k evropeiskomu domu’, Novyi mir, 7 (1989), 166–84Google Scholar; and ‘Gorbachev's Leadership: A Soviet View’, Soviet Economy, 6 (1990), 155–9.Google Scholar

¹⁰² Migranyan, , ‘Gorbachev's Leadership’, p. 155.Google Scholar