Overview
This book analyzes the efforts by Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), to transform the relationship between the bureaucratic core of full-time party officials (the 'inner party') and the Communists who manned the Soviet state (the 'outer party'). Jonathan Harris argues that the efforts of party officials, headed by the secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee, to direct members of the 'outer party' were the essence of so-called party leadership of the entire political system, and that Gorbachev's reforms destroyed the basis of this leadership. Finally, Subverting the System shows how orthodox party officials not only directly challenged Gorbachev's definitions but worked vigorously to restore their own authority during the last years of Gorbachev's reign; opposition contributed significantly to the attempted coup against him in 1991.
Synopsis
Subverting the System deals with an issue of fundamental importance, namely the internal evolution of the regime in the final years of Soviet power. In particular the book examines the contradictory approaches taken by Gorbachev in relation to the role and organization of the Communist Party, contradictions that effectively paralyzed the party as a functioning political organization and that ultimately provoked a dynamic that led to the fall of the system in its entirety.
Editorials
Europe-Asia Studies
A useful contribution to the literature on that last, remarkable period of Soviet history which witnessed the dismantling of the communist system, a process which was largely completed more than two years before the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.— Archie Brown
Russian Review
You might have thought that there was little more to be said about the Gorbachev period, and about its ruling party in particular. Jonathan Harris's book suggests a rather different conclusion…. An illuminating essay on the dynamics of political change through the perspective of party officials who were responsible for implementing the Gorbachev reforms, but who all too often had little to guide them.— Stephen White, University of Glasgow
The Russian Review
Perhaps the most satisfactory account that has yet appeared of what the Gorbachev reforms meant to those who were engaged in them at lower levels of the party structure. . . . Serious students of the CPSU will find themselves in its debt for some time to come.— Stephen White