History of the Soviet Union (1982–91) the people. It was still that this country was governed and kept together, as a structure, as a government structure, by the fear from Stalinist times." The principal elements of the old Soviet political system were Communist Party dominance, the hierarchy of soviets, state socialism, and ethnic federalism. Gorbachev's programs of "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness) produced radical unforeseen effects that brought that system down. As a means of reviving the Soviet state, Gorbachev repeatedly attempted to build a coalition of political leaders supportive of reform and created new arenas and bases of power. He implemented these measures because he
Mikhail Gorbachev Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, who was made Secretary of the Central Committee in July 1985. For the first two years of his leadership, Gorbachev's watchword was "acceleration". He claimed that the Soviet Union would accelerate industrial output to the extent that it would match that of the United States by 2000. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom. By late 1986, he was referring to this reform as a failure. Drunkenness was a major social problem in the 1980s, and Andropov had planned for a