The Parliamentarisation of the Soviet Union: Gorbachev and Representative Democracy

Abstract How did the Soviet Union, a country with a profoundly anti-parliamentary political tradition and a one-party regime firmly in place, so suddenly take the path of contested elections and public, deliberative politics in the late 1980s? This article offers both long- and short-term answers to this question. Looking back to the 1950s and 1960s, it shows that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European people’s democracies were not entirely anti-parliamentary in the post-Stalin era. Domestically, they needed the legitimacy afforded by national legislative assemblies, which offered something different from the Leninist model of grass-roots popular democracy. Internationally, they presented these national assemblies as demonstrations of their democratic credentials, notably through their membership of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The second half of the article switches to the short term, studying in detail Gorbachev’s publications and utterances between 1985 and 1989 for the light they shed on the Soviet Union’s slide into one-party parliamentarism. Starting out in 1985–86 as a determined defender of ‘Leninist’ political culture, Gorbachev increasingly looked to competitive elections and public debate as means of achieving his political and economic ends. In the process, he and his inner circle gravitated to the global norm of parliamentary politics—a norm that continued to influence even the authoritarian Russian government of the early twenty-first century, which maintained the forms of parliamentarism if not its content.