Perestroika e Glasnost : reformas de Gorbatchev e o fim do regime soviético (1985-1991) : uma análise histórica sob a perspectiva marxista

Abstract

This study analyzes the reforms implemented by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) between 1985 and 1991, investigating how Perestroika and Glasnost represented not an attempt at socialist renewal, but rather a mechanism through which the Soviet bureaucracy transformed itself into a new capitalist class, completing the process of bourgeois restoration in the USSR. Employing historical-dialectical materialism as the fundamental methodology, the research examines the structural contradictions of the bureaucratized Soviet system that rendered its terminal crisis inevitable, applying Marxist theoretical categories of class analysis, social contradictions, and transitions between modes of production. The study primarily draws on the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky on socialist transition, complemented by the contributions of Ernest Mandel and Antonio Gramsci. The processual analysis follows three distinct phases: the initial reform period (1985–1987), characterized by the creation of legal and economic conditions for transition; the restorationist radicalization (1987–1989), marked by the acceleration of economic decentralization and political liberalization; and the consummation of the bourgeois counterrevolution (1989–1991), culminating in the collapse of the USSR. The results demonstrate that Gorbachev’s reforms functioned as instruments of Gramscian transformism, through which the bureaucracy presented capitalist restoration as socialist modernization, employing Glasnost to ideologically delegitimize socialism and Perestroika to introduce market relations incompatible with central planning. The research empirically confirms Trotsky’s predictions in The Revolution Betrayed regarding the fate of the Soviet bureaucracy, validating the superiority of Marxist analysis over bourgeois theories of democratic transition. It is concluded that the Soviet collapse does not represent a failure of genuine socialism, but rather highlights the dangers of bureaucratization in workers’ states and provides fundamental lessons on the necessity of workers’ democratic control for any contemporary revolutionary process.