The Problems of Perestroika: The KGB and Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms
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2021-01-01
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The KGB and the rest of the Soviet intelligence and policing apparatus are commonly portrayed as having been among the staunchest of conservative opponents to the reform process in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1980s. But while key leaders of the August 1991 effort to oust General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, did come from the security services, this characterization obscures how the KGB rank-And-file responded to and participated in the reforms. This article uses their own words and experiences, recorded in the KGBs top-secret in-house journal, Sbornik KGB SSSR, to examine how everyday KGB officers navigated liberalizing reforms in which they in fact played an active and evolving role implementing and shaping. In these firsthand accounts, which cover topics from nationalism to environmentalism, a sense of loss of control is clear, both over events unfolding in the Soviet Union and over their own leading role and privileged position within it.
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Miles, S (2021). The Problems of Perestroika: The KGB and Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms. Slavic Review, 80(4). pp. 816–838. 10.1017/slr.2022.4 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24948.
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Simon Miles
Simon Miles joined the faculty of the Sanford School of Public Policy in 2017. He is an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union whose research focuses primarily on Cold War diplomatic and military history and its relevance to our world today. His first book, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, published in 2020 by Cornell University Press, uses international archives — from both sides of the Iron Curtain — to explain how and why the US-Soviet rivalry underwent such unexpected and profound change in the 1980s that it has since become a textbook case of adversaries setting aside disagreements and cooperating. Simon is currently working on his second book, On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991, under advance contract with Princeton University Press. Drawing on archival materials from all of the Pact’s eight former members, it examines the ways in which each conceived of and provided for their own security in the nuclear age, individually and as a politico-military alliance. It also holds a mirror up to US and NATO strategy during the Cold War: identifying the real motivations behind Soviet and Warsaw Pact behavior, disaggregating correlation and causation with strategy on the other side of the Iron Curtain. At Duke, Simon teaches courses on grand strategy, military and diplomatic history, Russia, and the Cold War.
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