The most important event of the late twentieth century began twenty years ago this month. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold. Perestroika, as Gorbachev called his reforms, officially ended with the Soviet Union and his leadership in December 1991. The historic opportunities for a better future it offered Russia and the world have been steadily undermined ever since.
The essential meaning of perestroika for Gorbachev and his supporters was creating and acting on alternatives to failed and dangerous policies at home and abroad. Inside the Soviet Union, it meant replacing the Communist Party's repressive political monopoly with multiparty politics based on democratic elections and an end of censorship (glasnost) and replacing the state's crushing economic monopoly with market relations based on different forms of ownership, including private property. Both of those liberating reforms, which were directed at czarist and Soviet authoritarian traditions, were well under way by the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet Union had already ceased to be a Communist or, as it was often characterized, "totalitarian" system.
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