Unseen Roots of an Unexpected Revolution: Party Elites, Economic Reforms, and Expectations versus Outcomes in Late 1980s Leningrad

Abstract

The article examines the perestroika processes from the Leningrad point of view. Surprisingly, but events in Moscow and, eventually, in the media were initially more conservative and sluggish than the discussions behind closed doors in Leningrad — but before long, roles were reversed, and public discourse became increasingly more creative and even radical than those private discussions requested by Smolny. The other point is that local enterprise directors (and other organizational actors and elites, e. g. in the Komsomol) started to act on their own interests and opportunities. The growing acceptance of some form of Western market economies (even if adapted to some “Soviet” form) meant that directors could steal a step on Smolny and even Moscow. Gorbachev reforms offered the possibility of taking reforms beyond local Party and state headquarters — Smolny and the Councils — to economic actors themselves. This threatened to make the Councils redundant, if such reforms were serious. Authors suggest, this is what happened. Authors’ data suggest that the Councils in the initial phase of reform (and perhaps Gorbachev) underestimated how important and central the shadow economy had become by then. Gorbachev opened the economy, hoping that devolution and some liberalization would harness, not fight, the initiative in the shadows. However, shadow practices were so wrapped up in formal institutions, and so ingrained among economic (and other) actors, that unleashing the shadow economy risked unraveling institutions as actors used the brief open window to gain as much as they could. It ended up a wager both on the entrepreneur and the thief — leaving Smolny and the Councils, the first stage of reform, in history. What did survive, however, were those networks of younger reform-minded cadres, who in the new world would find their place driving the next stage of radical reforms.