the “Evil Empire” and launched a massive military buildup, Gorbachev vowed to bow out of the arms race. Even as President Ronald Reagan called the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev believed that a better Soviet economy depended on better relationships with the rest of the world, especially the United States. Gorbachev also encouraged foreign investment in Soviet enterprises. Workers were given the right to strike for better wages and conditions. He believed that private initiative would lead to innovation, so individuals and cooperatives were allowed to own businesses for the first time since the 1920s. The best way to revive the Soviet economy, Gorbachev thought, was to loosen the government’s grip on it. The second set of reforms was known as perestroika, or economic restructuring. For the first time, parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections. Newspapers could print criticisms of the government. Glasnost eliminated traces of Stalinist repression, like the banning of books and the omnipresent secret police, and gave new freedoms to Soviet citizens. The first of these was known as glasnost, or political openness. Gorbachev introduced two sets of policies that he hoped would help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. The first leader of this Soviet state was the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. In 1922, Russia proper joined its far-flung republics to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar and four socialist republics were established. The Origins and Evolution of the Soviet State It was a peaceful end to a long, terrifying and sometimes bloody epoch in world history. However, Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and resigned from his job on December 25. The once-mighty Soviet Union had fallen, largely due to the great number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. Because the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) had already declared their independence from the USSR, only one of its 15 republics, Kazakhstan, remained. Instead, they declared they would establish a Commonwealth of Independent States. Representatives from Soviet republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) had already announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. The Revolutions of 1989 and the Fall of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika.

The Origins and Evolution of the Soviet State.

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