Yearnings for political change – dormant for decades, suppressed by coercion and perceptions of unattainability – can suddenly appear realizable with the emergence of new stimuli and facilitating conditions. For a Fourth Wave of Democratization, which ended Communist rule in Europe, the Gorbachev-led fundamental change of the Soviet political system and of Soviet foreign policy was the crucial facilitator. There was a circular flow of influence, which began but did not end in Moscow, in which a liberalization that evolved into democratization in the Soviet Union acted as a stimulus to pressure from below in East-Central Europe. But the attainment of decommunization and national independence in those countries emboldened the most disaffected nations within the Soviet multinational state. The transformation of the Soviet political system was consciously sought by Gorbachev, but the fragility of the state in conditions of political pluralism became evident. The USSR was not in crisis in 1985 but fundamental reform led to crisis by 1990–91. Gorbachev’s embrace of political pluralism plus Yeltsin’s paradoxical demand for Russian independence from the Union led to the Soviet breakup. Even apparently consolidated political orders, America’s included, are potentially fragile, as Trump’s attempted subversion of US democracy, with Republican Congressional backing, has underlined.

‘The Gorbachev revolution’ was of decisive importance in relation to the end of the Cold War. The wording itself, though, requires some elaboration. The profound changes that occurred in the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1980s were not, it goes without saying, simply the work of one man. However, reform from below, not to speak of revolution in a more conventional sense of the term, was infeasible. Not only was the system rigidly hierarchical, but it also embodied a sophisticated array of rewards for conformist behaviour and calibrated punishments for political deviance. The Communist Party was, moreover, able to devote vast resources to propagating its version of reality, especially successfully in the realm of foreign policy. Average Soviet citizens did not have the kind of personal experience which would have enabled them to call into question the story of the Soviet Union’s struggle for peace in the face of provocative acts by hostile imperialist forces.

The term ‘Gorbachev revolution’ is apt inasmuch as changes of revolutionary dimensions – especially pluralisation of the political system – occurred under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership and with the full weight of his authority and the power of the office of Communist Party leader behind them. The notion of revolution from above is also, though, paradoxical, for Gorbachev was by temperament a reformer rather than a revolutionary. The resolution of the paradox is to be found in Gorbachev’s pursuit of revolutionary goals by evolutionary means, phraseology he frequently used himself.

The task of leadership in the conditions of collapse of the Soviet Union has been a conspicuously difficult one. The legacy from the Communist period of a decaying economy, vast ecological disaster areas, uncertainty about the legitimacy of political institutions and the character of Russia's statehood meant that the problems facing the leadership in both the executive and legislative branches of government were grave indeed. They were compounded by a sense of loss of superpower status, together with concern for the fate of twenty-five million Russians, formerly Soviet citizens, who now found themselves in the Near Abroad–the former union republics of the USSR.

Yet, as President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin had a number of advantages both over his de facto predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, and as compared with the leaders of almost all the other Soviet successor states. Yeltsin's victory in elections in three successive years–in the Moscow constituency of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR in 1989, from his native Sverdlovsk (now restored to its old name, Ekaterinburg) in the election to the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia in 1990, and in the Presidential election of June 1991–gave him a greater democratic legitimacy than any other politician in the country.