But the Soviet authorities clearly overestimated the extent to which that revolution could be controlled. Perestroika and the ensuing reforms of 1992 were a political, social, mental, behavioral, psychological, and economic revolution. The emergence of Gorbachev was greeted with relief by the country. After nearly twenty years of economic stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev and the deaths of three aging Soviet leaders in just two and a half years, people were ready for change-and for a change in leadership. Perestroika was a revolution of expectations. Gorbachev did understand that, but only partly: the final Soviet leader could never have imagined that by loosening the screws and ushering in glasnost and elements of a market economy he would lose not only socialism, but the empire itself. Does Mikhail Sergeyevich understand this?” After all, what’s needed is a ‘revolution from above.’ Nothing less. Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s election as general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on April 23, 1985, his future aide Anatoly Chernyaev wrote in his diary: “There are great expectations of Gorbachev, just as there were of Andropov.
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