Gorbachev’s Export of Perestroika to Eastern Europe: Democratisation Reconsidered

This book looks at the liberalisation process in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the period of 1987-1989, focusing on Gorbachev’s initiative to encourage perestroika in all the fraternal regimes of CEE outside the Soviet Union. Archival materials, interviews and textual analysis identify a common initiative between 1987 and 1989 among the fraternal communist parties of CEE to perpetuate the one-party system across this space by liberalising the economy and modernising the regime. By this stage there was dialogue among these leaderships and agreement that the economic crisis was systemic, and that the one-party model was unsustainable. Support for the Party in society had plummeted across CEE and the underlying rationale was therefore to boost membership and find other ways to mobilise individuals in support of the regime. For this purpose, the fraternal parties were expected to follow the example of the CPSU in convening the national party conference, an all-party meeting on a similar scale to the five-yearly congress, and yet mysteriously, one which was barely described in the Party Statutes and rarely convoked.
A broad historical institutionalist framework is deployed, which demonstrates that the choice of the party conference, as an institution, was crucial to the respective party leaderships in achieving their aims: to stage the Party’s consolidation of power and publicise that the party would not relinquish its leading role in society.
This book will be of interest to those studying the transition process in CEE, democratisation, comparative politics more generally and students of research methods.