In 1985, the Soviet Union looked powerful from the outside. It had nuclear weapons, a huge army, and control over Eastern Europe.
But inside, the system was running on empty.
Since 1917, the USSR had been ruled by one party: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No other party was allowed to stand for election.
This is called a one-party state — and it made the system very rigid. Bad decisions couldn't be challenged, and new ideas struggled to get through.
- The Politburo — a small group of senior Party leaders who made every major decision for 280 million people
- Central planning — the state, not supply and demand, decided what factories made and what things cost
- No free press — newspapers and TV were controlled by the Party, so failures were hidden or blamed on the West
- The nomenklatura — a privileged class of Party officials who got the best jobs, flats, and shops, while ordinary Soviets queued for bread
By the early 1980s this rigidity was a real problem. Three leaders died in quick succession (Brezhnev in 1982, Andropov in 1984, Chernenko in 1985), and each was an old, cautious Party insider who avoided real change.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader in March 1985, he was 54 — young for the Politburo — and he knew the system needed to change or it would collapse under its own weight.
Why the one-party system matters for causation: A rigid one-party state cannot self-correct easily. Mistakes pile up because there is no opposition party, free press, or election to force a change of direction — so problems that a democracy might fix early instead build for decades until reform becomes an emergency, not a choice.
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Gorbachev didn't want to destroy communism — he wanted to save it by fixing its worst problems.
He launched two famous reform policies, and a historian must know exactly what each one meant.
Glasnost ("openness"), from 1985
Loosened censorship. Newspapers could now criticise inefficiency, and citizens could discuss problems that used to be forbidden — including Stalin's crimes and the failing economy.
Perestroika ("restructuring"), from 1987
Tried to reform the economy — allowing small private businesses (cooperatives) and giving factories more control over their own production, instead of everything being centrally planned.
The unintended result
Glasnost let people say openly what perestroika could not fix: that the economy was stagnant, food was short, and the Party itself had failed the people for decades.
Glasnost opened people's mouths; perestroika couldn't fill their fridges — so the mouths turned on the Party.
This is the central irony historians must explain: Gorbachev's reforms were meant to strengthen the USSR, but they accelerated its collapse instead.
Once people could criticise the Party openly, and once economic problems were visible rather than hidden, the Party's authority drained away fast.
Economic stagnation didn't start in 1985: Growth had already been slowing since the 1970s — a period historians call the era of stagnation. Gorbachev inherited this problem; his reforms exposed it rather than causing it.
By 1990, shops in Moscow had empty shelves and long queues even for basic goods like soap and sugar.
This mattered hugely for causation: an economic system that cannot deliver for its people loses the loyalty of even its own citizens, not just outside critics.
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The USSR had controlled Eastern Europe since 1945 through the Warsaw Pact and by threatening to send in tanks if a country tried to leave communism.
It had sent in tanks before
- Hungary (1956)
- Czechoslovakia (1968)
But in 1989, Gorbachev made a decision that changed everything: he refused to use force to keep Eastern European communist governments in power.
| Country | What happened in 1989 |
|---|---|
| Poland | Free elections in June 1989 — the communist party lost heavily to the Solidarity movement |
| Hungary | Reformist government opened its border with Austria in May 1989, letting East Germans escape west |
| East Germany | The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 after mass protests and a government mistake in an announcement |
| Czechoslovakia | The 'Velvet Revolution' in November–December 1989 ended communist rule almost without violence |
| Romania | Communist leader Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed in December 1989 — the only violent case |
Historians call Gorbachev's refusal to intervene the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Once Eastern Europeans saw that Soviet tanks would not come, one government after another fell within months.
This is a huge cause-and-effect chain for Paper 1: if the USSR could not hold onto Eastern Europe, could it hold together itself?
Link it back to the inquiry question: When answering "what caused the transition?", always connect 1989 back to the USSR directly: the loss of Eastern Europe humiliated Gorbachev, emboldened Soviet republics (like the Baltic states) to demand independence too, and proved that communist rule could be challenged and beaten.
By 1990–91, the same pressures — a stagnant economy, open criticism thanks to glasnost, and the visible collapse of communism next door — reached the USSR itself.
That set the stage for the Soviet Union's own collapse in December 1991, which the next micro-topics in this focused study explore.