In my view it is still too early to make any definitive assessment. As a historian, I have to take a long-term view, and with Gorbachev that is not yet possible. When you make such an assessment, you have to ask: what did the person in question leave behind? We might, for example, take Khrushchev. Although many of Khrushchev’s reforms were unsuccessful, nonetheless a great deal of what he did remained. On the other hand, however much Brezhnev wanted to rehabilitate Stalin, and to restore certain of Stalin’s policies, he had only limited success.

You can call Gorbachev a great reformer, someone who brought about fundamental changes to the situation in the country and to the world. But we will only really be able to pronounce judgment on this in another ten or fifteen years. Gorbachev embarked on huge reforms, but he did not have any conscious plan. From the very first, his reforms were badly thought out and quite devoid of effective forecasting. He followed a course that consisted of successive zigzags to the right or left. Many reforms were simply mistaken, and by pursuing them he sharply undermined people’s confidence in him. So now, despite the aura of ‘Gorbachev the great reformer’, despite the fact that he radically transformed our society, the mass of the population has a very low regard for him. Now the last vestiges of support that he had within the Communist Party are gone as well—Gorbachev himself renounced them. Communists now despise him even more than other people.

When Gorbachev took power, our country was in a perilous condition. And when we look around us now, six years after Gorbachev began his reforms, what do we see? We are producing less in quantitative terms, and the quality of our output has not improved. People are working less well than they were before: only a few individual enterprises are working better. The performance of our agriculture has deteriorated; none of this sector’s underlying problems have been solved. The Union has fallen apart, split into a series of separate republics, and in many of these a similar process of disintegration is underway. The monetary system is disintegrating, and the rate of inflation is growing. Meanwhile, what has been gained? Now there is at least a certain democracy, freedom of speech and opinion, and of course this is good. But to a significant degree this occurred independently of Gorbachev; the situation in the country became so bad that people simply spoke out, and could not be stopped. He gave people opportunities which they took in ways that surprised and displeased him. Gorbachev introduced certain changes to official ideology, but did not carry them through to their logical conclusions. He proclaimed the advent of ‘new thinking’, but this was merely a slogan. There was talk of a new concept of socialism, a new approach, but this was not followed up. Electoral processes were established, but Gorbachev himself did not utilize them in a timely fashion, nor create the conditions where his project could benefit from them.

Gorbachev repeatedly initiated drastic changes of direction. In 1985 he began his reforms with an anti-alcoholism campaign. Using forcible and quite undemocratic administrative-command methods, he tried to wean people off vodka. There was also a campaign against smoking. What has come out of all this? Now people are drinking more. But the anti-alcoholism campaign helped bring about the collapse of the financial system, because the government drew a great deal of its revenue from the sale of alcohol, which is a state monopoly. Then in 1986 Gorbachev began a struggle against unearned incomes. It did not last long—about two months. There was supposed to be a campaign against speculators—somebody who obtained a sack of potatoes from his neighbour and sold them at the market would be regarded as a speculator because he sold them for more than he paid his neighbour. The markets stopped working, and the links between the countryside and the towns suffered. Then we saw a turnaround. When it became obvious that the government’s policies were arousing dissatisfaction and that the economic situation was worsening, the law on cooperation was adopted, along with legislation on the independence of enterprises. But these moves were not properly thought through. For this reason the cooperatives, right from the beginning, took on a speculative character and not a productive one; they failed to put significant new quantities of goods on the market. The law on the independence of enterprises was also poorly thought out. We saw the rise of ‘collective egoism’; each enterprise thought solely of itself, just as in Yugoslavia. The links between enterprises were broken, and production levels failed to improve.

In the countryside, Gorbachev sought initially to solve the problems through changes to the system of administration of agriculture, just as Khrushchev had done, without understanding that the critical thing was initiative from below, from the peasants themselves. Huge, unwieldy new administrative apparatuses were set up—Agropromsoyuz, Agroprom of the Russian Federation. These colossal administrative structures subsequently collapsed; today nothing remains of them. Tens of thousands of people worked for these organizations, but they hindered the development of agriculture rather than helping it.

The question arose of how to bring about improvements in the quality of Soviet-made goods. A ‘State Committee for the Control of the Quality of Production’ was set up. As well as the control this exercised over the enterprises, a huge state organization called ‘Gospriyomka’ (‘state acceptance agency’) was established. Gospriyomka was supposed to accept the products of the enterprises and to test their quality. A huge new apparatus arose, with thousands of functionaries, but the quality of goods failed to improve. Then this was all abolished, and now we are trying to carry out a transition to the market, so that the market will directly regulate the quantity and quality of goods. But they decided they wanted to carry out this transition fast. Last year they worked out the ‘Programme of Five Hundred Days’—the period in which we were to make the transition to the market. But you don’t need me to convince you that making a transition to the market in the space of five hundred days was impossible. Because in so enormous an economic system as the Soviet Union, based not on the market but on command-administer relations—where there were few banks capable of providing financial services under market conditions, where there were no exchanges, where none of the structures of the market system existed—it doesn’t matter what things cost, because the state will cover the losses. But the market system is much more subtle. It demands quite different people, quite different economic structures, quite different relationships between regions, a quite distinct system of relations between enterprises. In the West all this was established over centuries, but we decided to create it in the space of five hundred days. And, of course, it didn’t work. So in the Soviet Union today no one lives better than they did ten years ago, if we discount the 2 or 3 per cent of the population who are growing rich on speculation. The workers and peasants, the intelligentsia, army officers, are all much worse off.

Glasnost was an excellent thing, but its effect was to release a flood of complaints. During the years of Soviet power intense dissatisfaction had built up. The effect of democratization was not to cause people to express their goodwill, their suggestions, their constructive ideas, but rather to show their animosity. Instead of enthusiasm, an enormous negative potential rose to the surface.