The formal context of Soviet politics had not changed significantly by the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. He was chosen general secretary by a secret vote of the Politburo with consultative input from some of the most influential regional Party leaders in the Central Committee. The reigning ideology remained Marxism–Leninism, and the audiences for authority-building strategies remained the elite representatives of the institutional pillars of the system. The short-term material interests and political identities of patrons and clients within those institutions remained essentially as they had been for decades. For these reasons, quite a few observers – while intrigued by the prospect of a young and articulate general secretary – did not harbor very high hopes that he would be inclined or able to transform the system. He was, after all, a product of that system and a man who had been chosen for advancement by the aged guardians of the Leninist system. If Suslov, Brezhnev, and Andropov could all endorse his meteoric rise into the highest reaches of power, how much of a free thinker could he possibly be?

What had changed, however, was the climate of opinion within the Soviet political establishment. That climate was quite different from the one that prevailed at the time of Khrushchev's ouster and was, in many ways, analogous to the one that had prevailed at the time of Stalin's death. Both 1953 and 1985 were marked by a widespread sense within the Politburo and Central Committee that something had to give, that things could not continue in the old way.