Volta
PoliticsMarch 1985 – December 1991

Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost

Also called: Perestroika, Glasnost

Soviet leader Gorbachev introduced restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) and pursued arms control with the US through his “new thinking”. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell one after another and the Cold War ended.

Reagan and Gorbachev at their first summit, Geneva, 19 November 1985
Reagan and Gorbachev at their first summit, Geneva, 19 November 1985

President (1981-1989 : Reagan). White House Photographic Office. 1981-1989 · Public domain · Source

Becoming general secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev sought to revive a stagnant economy with market-oriented restructuring (perestroika) and opened up the press and information (glasnost). The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 made the case for openness all the plainer.

Abroad, he signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the US in 1987, withdrew from Afghanistan and renounced interference in Eastern Europe. In 1989 communist regimes fell in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere, and at Malta that December Bush and Gorbachev declared the Cold War over. Amid economic crisis and ethnic conflict, however, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

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States and rulers at the time
Soviet Union — Leader Mikhail Gorbachev

People

  • Mikhail Gorbachev1931 – 2022

    leader · Soviet leader (1985–1991) and first president of the USSR whose perestroika and glasnost ended the Cold War but could not prevent the Soviet collapse; Nobel Peace Prize 1990

Before and after

Earlier
1957 Launch of Sputnik 1
Later
1988 Nordpolitik

Themes that include this event

  • The Cold War1945 – 1991

    From Yalta to the dissolution of the Soviet Union — half a century in which two blocs led by the US and the USSR divided the world