A Case for Global Perestroika
Moscow, Sept. 1, 1987. The excitement is palpable in the crisp autumn air. Dressed in uniform, dark blue pants and jacket over a white shirt, I am heading with my mother and grandmother to what will be my first day of school. Like other children, I am carrying a large bouquet for the teacher: The gladioli’s stems are as long as the occasion is momentous. There will be a morning ceremony, during which we will stand in a line and listen to the speeches of the school’s director and teachers, who will welcome us to the world of education and the next stage in our lives.
Everything seems to unfold in the best of Soviet traditions, but this is only an appearance. Given the ambitious program known as perestroika and glasnost that Mikhail Gorbachev initiated two years prior, teachers are no longer under the obligation to follow the standard curriculum or even the same pedagogic methodology as before. This opening up (one of the significations of glasnost) ushered in different ideas not only about what shape history and other even more ideology-prone subjects could now assume, but also about how to teach them. Fresh out of the pedagogic college, my first teacher, Tatyana Lvovna, decides not to assign any homework to her Grade 1 students, something that would have been unheard of before and is still out of question in many educational systems nowadays. I owe a great deal of my intellectual development to her and others like her, who cherished and promoted their students’ creativity and imagination.
At schools and universities, perestroika and glasnost encouraged the awakening of young minds to a world of possibilities. Of course, there was resistance, from established teaching staff or conservatively inclined members of the Politburo. But the more-or-less sudden collapse of restrictions on freedom of speech and thought had an enlivening effect. One new official slogan went, “Perestroika is reliance on the living creativity of the masses,” and the radical changes perestroika brought about had palpable effects on life at school and at work, in the streets and in the media. Politics was no longer a subject of hushed conversations at the kitchen table. It was everywhere.
According to its formal definition, perestroika refers to a mesh of economic reforms intended to liberalize the Soviet economy by allowing small-scale private entrepreneurship, property ownership (including of housing), and elements of the market system. But if that had been its be-all and end-all, then perestroika would have been virtually indistinguishable from Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, which reluctantly suffused capitalist traits into a fledgling Soviet state in the grip of a civil war.
Gorbachev himself frequently acknowledged that the dire state of the stagnant Soviet economy, marked by deficient planning and exhausted by decades of an impossible competition with the West, left him with no choice but to undertake a drastic revamping of the entire system. Yet Lenin’s (forced) adoption of NEP and Gorbachev’s (necessary) perestroika, which marked, respectively, the beginning and the end of Soviet history, are as different as can be. The former was an avowedly temporary measure, cordoned off from the ideological supports of the Communist experiment; the latter was initiated with the intention that it would endure, and expand, beyond strictly economic matters to the education system and society at large. Not only was perestroika there to stay into the second half of the 1980s; it was a variation on the Trotskyite theme of a permanent revolution: It would be a vehicle for a new communitarian philosophy and praxis, if no longer of a classic Communist variety. So sweeping was its power that the traditional distinction between the economic structure and the ideological superstructure could not withstand it; perestroika was to change every aspect of the Soviet world.
Some will read between these lines a nostalgic reminiscence about the final years of the USSR. And they will ask, explicitly or implicitly: Why focus on perestroika beyond its instrumental value in bringing down the Soviet colossus? Forty years after it was launched for a country that no longer exists by a politician who has since died, how can it be relevant to the present?
Worse, perestroika got a bad rap in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was blamed for accentuating social, economic, and political fissures in the country and for aggravating shortages of basic goods. It was characterized as a nefarious force, closer to anarchy than democracy; it was said to have brought about disorder—and disorder, once unleashed, cannot be easily controlled. On such a reading, perestroika is inherently immoderate, less a push for reform than the heedless destruction of a system.
I beg to differ. For one thing, the legacy of perestroika is still far from settled. It seems telling to me that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime would be so invested in demonizing that part of late Soviet history alongside the Boris Yeltsin years of post-Soviet Russia: The effects of perestroika are not desirable from the standpoint of those bent on maintaining their iron grip on power and benefiting from an unsustainable status quo.
Perestroika represented a brief and rather rare period of freedom in both Soviet and Russian history, but it was also more than that there—and it was more than a merely local event. A clue to its greater significance is tattooed on its little-known philosophical underbelly. Consider another of its slogans: “Perestroika, continuing the work of October!” No doubt, economic factors prompted Gorbachev to embark on such an ambitious course of action, but there was something else at work, too. After the epoch of stagnation (zastoy) under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82), coupled with the heavy bureaucratization of the entire state apparatus and society, the ideals of the October Revolution of 1917 (the emancipation of the oppressed, radical equality, local self-government) appeared to be all but extinguished. Perestroika was supposed to reactivate the lively beginnings of the Soviet project, with its radical democratization of governance by local decision-making bodies (precisely: the soviets, or people’s councils).
Viewed in this light, the project of perestroika fits squarely within Western thought, from the 16th-century theologian Martin Luther to the 20th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl. Both men were concerned with how meaning had ossified or deadened in both theories and institutions. Luther’s main project was to rekindle Christian faith by freeing it from the strict hierarchical and ritualistic structures of the Catholic Church; for Husserl, the task of philosophy was to bring abstract concepts back to their experiential basis in real life. Husserl even adopted a mineralogical metaphor, calling for a “de-sedimentation” of the layers that had accreted above the life-giving spark of thought. With this, he wanted to reconnect to the impulse that had spawned the concepts in the first place.
A similar return to first principles also unfolded in Gorbachev’s USSR, including in the self-perception of intellectuals at the time. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida reported that when he visited Moscow in 1990 “certain Soviet philosophers” told him that “the best translation of perestroika was still ‘deconstruction.’” The prefix pere- actually implies repeated action and, in conjunction with -stroika, is more accurately rendered as “reconstruction.” Still, that translation must have made Derrida quite proud for it was loaded with a good deal of bitter irony: By the time of his trip (a year before the final collapse of the USSR), the negative consequences of unpicking the old stuffy system were already much more evident than the positive imagining of a different future. That said, perestroika was all the rage back then—and it should inspire how we rethink our approach to the world’s current problems.
The risk that an endeavor akin to perestroika—or to Luther-inspired Reformation or, for that matter, to Husserl’s de-sedimentation—would culminate in destruction, instead of reconstruction, is real. How not to succumb entirely to the impulse that sweeps up the old system; how not to reduce its building blocks to proverbial dust? But this is a risk worth taking, given the predisposition of states, institutions, conceptual systems, and so forth to collapse under their own weight, often burying with them untold numbers of lives. The delicate balance between destruction and reconstruction must be sought on a trial-and-error basis.
Perestroika was perhaps the first attempt in history at neither a revolution nor a reform but at something combining elements of the two while also moving beyond them—a project that attended to both the structural problems at hand and the enlivening impulse those problems tend to block. Revolution calls for the reversal of power structures. Reform entails tinkering with parts of the system while maintaining it intact. Perestroika implicitly acknowledged that life and living together (in a community, in a state, and, of course, on a planet) are a work in progress without any assured foundations. In fact, living together means constantly working on the very foundations of coexistence: re-founding or reinventing them, reaffirming and recommitting to what has been forgotten or neglected. First principles are not objectively given once and for all. They are to be negotiated anew, politically, again and again, with openness and the participation of all.
Today, as in 1985, it is perestroika that best points the way toward how we can reactivate the dynamic first principles of life and livability. In an era when teleological historical narratives have been debunked and when power is dispersed, revolution makes little sense. The insufficiency of mere reforms is glaring. Instead, it is necessary to revisit prevalent conceptions and practices about energy, intelligence, subjectivity, the good, and political organization so as to make them compatible with the flourishing of human and non-human beings, with ecosystems and societies. Perestroika suits this description to a T.
Granted, the animating force of perestroika in the Soviet Union was also its Achilles heel. Carving out a space for all things private in economic and extra-economic spheres left the fragile and vital dynamics of coexistence in shambles. Personal freedoms and private property, small businesses (tellingly called “cooperatives,” alluding to the ideal of co-ownership), and extreme individualism were embraced at the expense of being-together at the local and state levels. Quite understandably, this overreaction represented a swing of the pendulum after decades of collectivization, communal apartments, brutal state censorship, and a one-party system. Luckily, that overreaction was idiosyncratic to the Soviet case. In the 21st century, the excesses of privatization becloud the notion of the common good, and this comes back to haunt us in the shape of the ecological crisis, precisely as a crisis of the commons, including the elements themselves: breathable air, drinkable water, a fecund earth. Never before has work on the underpinnings of coexistence been a more urgent task, a problem raised almost at the level of our physiology.
Assuming that the climate crisis, rising inequalities, prevalent disrespect for international law, and genocides and mass crimes are parts of a complex polycrisis, then a global perestroika might have a shot at addressing them. The system of international law, set in place after World War II in order to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again, is all but in tatters. The right of the strongest rears its head and tries to prevail again, threatening a relapse to Hobbes’s state of nature. Genocides are neither prevented nor prosecuted as they should be under the 1948 UN Convention, and when the International Criminal Court attempts to prosecute those crimes or war crimes or crimes against humanity, some of the world’s most powerful states impose sanctions on its prosecutors. The climate crisis threatens hundreds of millions of lives and livelihoods, yet denialism about it is rampant, matched only by the cynicism of countries that conduct conferences under the UN’s aegis claiming to combat the problem even as they try to develop their cutting edge in highly polluting extractive industries. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few is occurring while the vast majority of the world’s people are denied the basic necessities of life, such as nourishment, breathable air, and amenable temperatures.
Existing political structures, institutions, and treaties—the UN, NATO, free trade agreements, the Paris Agreement—are already collapsing under environmental pressures and the unilateralism of major actors on the world stage. Technological innovations such as AI are spiraling out of control. A growing sense of helplessness, anxiety, and depression pervades even the youngest among us. An apocalyptic atmosphere is thickening, as all of these tendencies gather steam, reinforcing one another. Is what’s happening inexorable and hardwired into human nature, or the merciless forces of external nature? Either way, here are the effects: massive emissions of carbon particles and microplastics, heavy metals and toxins; the reshaping of entire ecosystems and of organisms themselves.
The idea behind a global perestroika is that the collapse underway need not
proceed according to a pre-scripted scenario. Even as we can humbly accept that human planning and projecting has limitations, there is a time and a place for freedom to be exercised in common, as it was for a few years before the dissipation of the USSR: As Gauthier Chapelle, Pablo Servigne, and Raphaël Stevens put it a few years ago, referring to “the critical situation in which our planet finds itself,” “another end of the world is possible.” Much like the effects of the current polycrisis do not stop at state boundaries, the radical restructuring that a global perestroika calls for cannot succeed within the confines of a single country. It calls for something beyond seesawing between parochial nationalisms and falsely universal neo-imperialisms; it invites a creative approach to planetary collaboration.
In the Moscow of the late 1980s, changes are everywhere. Basic goods are scarce, prompting long queues for shoes and sausages and other deficit items. Yet new books and magazines have been popping up like mushrooms after a warm rain. All of a sudden, my neighborhood bookstore, which I invariably visit on the way to the bakery, is featuring titles other than Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered or Maxim Gorky’s Mother. They are expensive, but books from the other side of the Iron Curtain or by previously unpublishable Soviet authors (Anatoly Rybakov and Andrey Platonov, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak) have become available for purchase almost overnight, in bookstores, kiosks, or independent stalls in underground crossings. Many of the uncensored periodicals and magazines, following the best tradition of yellow journalism, are filled with explicit images and rumors, apocalypticism and astrology. The recent nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the HIV/AIDS epidemic are the most widely discussed topics, sometimes featured under sensationalist headlines that have little to do with reality.
The anarchic proliferation of reading materials of both the best and the worst kinds was an offshoot of Gorbachev’s principle of glasnost. That concept is untranslatable with any single word in English; no Western ideal can be borrowed to render the late-Soviet realities it captures. It means openness and freedom of speech and whistleblowing and (literally) voicing—the voicing of complaints, as much as of hopes for an honest discussion. Can 21st-century social media compete with the vociferousness of that brief period in the life of a dying country? Social media may seem to embody glasnost on a global scale, but the way they monopolize and manipulate algorithms, often invisibly, for political purposes is far from the radical democratization and explosion of freedom that Gorbachev enabled. Any global perestroika in the future will have to reinvent glasnost.
One crucial lesson to be drawn from the collective experiments that bookended the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union is that those paid exquisite attention to the psyche and its revolutions. The efforts that were poured into cultivating “the new Soviet human being” (novyi sovetskiy chelovek) in the early 1920s and the promotion of openness after decades of censorship and political repressions in the late 1980s shared an intuition, and it was correct: Revolutionary changes would not take root unless, in a continuous feedback loop, they could activate and then be triggered again by changes in modes of thinking, in the imagining and perceiving of the world as well as of one’s role in it. What is sorely needed for our times is something like an inner perestroika: a deconstruction and a reconstruction (even without final completion) of concepts—another cultivation of affects and desires undertaken together with others and in line with ecosystemic or planetary processes.
Accomplishing this inner perestroika is perhaps the hardest task, since cognitive patterns and deep prejudices, notions naturalized as commonsense and self-perception, change even more slowly than do governments or entire regimes. In Russia, the return of harsh authoritarian rule after as little as a decade with Vladimir Putin at the helm of the state demonstrates that perestroika’s social and political outcomes were provisional and reversible. And yet the effort’s effects did not evaporate without leaving a trace. The generation that came of age under Gorbachev (and in part Yeltsin) sticks like a bone in the throat of a regime that demands total obedience from its citizens; in fact, last year Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, called it “garbage.”
Let’s go back for a moment to the seesawing between freshly regrouping neo-imperialisms and entrenched nationalisms. Ultimately, the countries with the most territory, resources, and military might—Russia, China, the US—view themselves as indispensable nations, with the right to make decisions not only for themselves but also for smaller states they think necessarily fall within the orbit of their influence. This redefinition of sovereignty means that even (generally right-wing) concerns about the loss of national sovereignty to transnational political formations, such as the European Union, are irrelevant. And neither side in the most recent dichotomy pitting “the globalists” against “the nationalists” is interested in robust international institutions, laws, or mechanisms of governance. Who, then, could be on the leading edge of a global perestroika in such a world disorder?
Also in stark contrast to the Soviet perestroika, which was a resolutely top-down exercise, a global perestroika today would have to be a bottom-up process, because there is no global political leadership to implement its potential programs. Reimagining the shape of coexistence—even existence itself—on this planet would be, at least initially, the joint task of people who may not have sovereignty in the traditional Western or Westphalian sense. I mean that indigenous groups, governments in exile, and repressed ethnic, religious, and other minorities—which probably represent the majority of the world’s population—have first-hand experience of displacement and suffering, of recent and deep-rooted injustices, of deprivation and discrimination. With environmental, political, and economic turbulence as the incessant background for experiments in collective imagination, our understandings of dwelling, for one thing, would be articulated in new ways, including for example as dwelling-in-exile. The notion of governance itself may also develop: In the age of climate change, mass displacements and migrations of humans and animals, radical evolutions to plant systems and, more broadly to the geo-bio-cultural make-up of places, governance in the 21st century is, by and large, governance in exile.
Relatively recent studies in political philosophy have pointed out how the excluded and the systemically marginalized (“the part who have no part”) are the agents of a new, non-totalitarian universality. From Jacques Rancière to Slavoj Žižek, the theorists behind those studies are engaged in a sort of intellectual perestroika of Marxism. What is missing from this vast and rich field, however, is the realization that dispossession is not only an economic issue related to class or the unequal distribution of power; it is the dispossession of livability itself, of the conditions that are indispensable for the thriving of most living beings on Earth, human or not. Ecological exile is not limited to the growing problem of climate refugees; it is an exile from the very ecologies that are propitious to life. A global perestroika designed to address those problems will be a nonstarter unless it dynamically reconfigures the relation between politics, economy, and ecology, including at the level of mental perceptions of what or who really guarantees livability.
Surprising collaborations may be stimulated by the shifting boundaries between these domains. Exiled politicians and intellectuals from Cuba and Venezuela, Russia and Belarus, Palestine and Tibet may find common ground with indigenous groups and associations: the Institute for Global Reconstitution could join forces with the Indigenous Environmental Network. I can only speculate about the possible outcomes of such discussions in a bottom-up process, driven by dispersed parts of the global civil society: Those actors, in contrast to the main political players, will be the torchbearers of a better future for all (or perhaps of any future at all). They should recognize, among other things, that the right to life involves not only a guaranteed livelihood, but also the cultivation and cherishing of a livable environment; that the elemental commons (the atmosphere, the earth, bodies of water) are shared by all living beings and cannot be polluted to the detriment of any among them; that any genocidal tendencies should be countered by a robust international force; that nation-states are not the only legitimate forms of political representation. They should encourage creative experiments in co-existence, particularly in traditional zones of intergroup conflicts. Above all, they—and we—must recognize that if any global perestroika is to succeed, it must be equally open to the input of all of us who have a stake in a flourishing world and who would keep constituting and reconstituting it afresh.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Berlin. His latest book is Pyropolitics: Fire and the Political (ibidem, 2025).
