Demokratizatsiya

The slogan emerges

On 27 January 1987, Gorbachev presented demokratizatsiya as the core engine of reform in a 25,000-word report to the Central Committee plenum titled 'Restructuring and the Party's Personnel Policy.' In his concluding speech he called it 'the lever which will make it possible to draw into the reorganization its decisive force, the people,' warning that 'if we do not do that, we shall not accomplish the tasks of acceleration, we shall not ensure the reorganization, and there will be just no reorganization at all.' His diagnosis was that the rigidity of the cadres system and the self-preserving resistance of the party apparatus were the fundamental obstacle to reform; his remedy was internal party democracy, the promotion of non-party personnel to leading posts, the restoration of the soviets as genuine organs of power, and multi-candidate elections.

What it changed

In the summer of 1987 local soviet elections were the first in Soviet history to offer a choice of candidates. The Nineteenth Party Conference of June 1988 resolved to transfer power from the party apparatus to elected soviets, and in March 1989 voters went to the polls in the first contested elections to a national legislative body, the Congress of People's Deputies. The results stunned the ruling elite: across the country, voters struck unopposed communist candidates from the ballot, and many senior party officials lost.

The boundary Gorbachev had drawn was clear: multi-candidate, not multi-party; the CPSU would retain sole custody of the ballot box. But he could not prevent political association from growing outside official structures. By the end of 1987 some 30,000 informal groups (neformaly) existed across the country, and in May 1988 the Democratic Union became the first independent political party.

How it is judged

Demokratizatsiya was the strategic turning point of Gorbachev's reform. Before it, his method had been to persuade the party apparatus and mediate bureaucratic resistance; after January 1987 he chose to appeal over the heads of the party to the people directly. Without this turn, neither the contested elections of 1989 nor the repeal of Article 6 in 1990 would have been possible. At the same time, precisely that opening created the political space that would turn against the reforming government itself, making demokratizatsiya the concept that most compactly captures the rise and fall of perestroika.