Perestroika

Perestroika (Russian: перестро́йка; IPA: [pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə]) was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s, widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "openness") policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

Perestroika is sometimes argued to be a cause of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War.

Summary

Perestroika allowed more independent actions from various ministries and introduced some market-like reforms. The goal of the perestroika, however, was not to end the command economy but rather to make socialism work more efficiently to better meet the needs of Soviet consumers. The process of implementing perestroika arguably exacerbated already existing political, social, and economic tensions within the Soviet Union and no doubt helped to further nationalism in the constituent republics. Perestroika and resistance to it are often cited as major catalysts leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika (disambiguation)

Perestroika was a series of political and economic reforms of the Soviet Union in the 1980s by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Perestroika may also refer to:

Perestroika Movement (political science)

The Perestroika Movement is a loose-knit intellectual tendency in academic political science which seeks to expand methodological pluralism in order to make the discipline more accessible and relevant to laypeople and non-specialist academics. Established in 2000, the movement was organized in response to the perceived hegemony of quantitative and mathematical methodology in the field. Such dominance breeds academic isolation and poor scholarship, the movement's leaders contend.

Origins

The Perestroika Movement began in 2000 with an anonymous e-mail message sent by one “Mr. Perestroika” to the editors of the American Political Science Review calling for "a dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in APSA." The message went to seventeen recipients who quickly forwarded it to others, and within weeks the Perestroika Movement became a force calling for change in the American political science community (Monroe 2005).

See also