Soviet Reformers: From Lenin to Gorbachev

The past—to use a phrase of Marx—”weighs like a nightmare” on the Soviet Union of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He is not the first Soviet leader to attempt to escape from the nightmare of Stalinism in order to make a radical change in how the Soviet Union functions. To understand the present effort, it is useful to look back historically at other such “reform” periods in Soviet history for what they can tell us about the general problem.