Editor's Introduction

Abstract

The first article in this issue contends that Gorbachev's reforms, particularly economic restructuring, cannot succeed because of the New Class of production managers, including Party officials, whose jobs are threatened by a shift to a system where markets instead of bureaucrats make economic decisions. Its author, Sergei Andreev, created a stir with his attack on the Party apparatus when the article was published in early 1989. But it is a measure of the quickening pace of reform that, in the aftermath of the February 1990 Central Committee plenum's call for the Party to surrender its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly on power, Andreev's analysis is remarkable in part for its apparent timidity. His class analysis, caught up in quotations of Lenin and Marxist gobbledygook about "ties to the masses," endorses Article 6 (since abandoned by the Central Committee) and expresses the apprehension that in conditions of pluralism Communists may be repressed, itself an indication of growing public disgust with the CPSU. Still, Andreev backs the idea that popular fronts, such as those in the Baltic, should challenge the Party apparatus.