Perestroika: from Dawn to Dusk (Article 1)

The article attempts to metaphysically reconstruct Perestroika as a historical phenomenon and to reveal a multi-layer nature of its historical being and evolution. The author considers Perestroika a way to recur, renew, and elevate the historical existence of Soviet history from an indifferent to identical being – a way to address the problem of identifying the being and ‘all that exists’ of Soviet history. In the author’s view, it emerges and exists as a way for Soviet history to overcome its identity crisis. The paper analyzes different theoretical and methodological approaches that endevour, from various angles and with varying degrees of insights into the research subjects, to reconstruct the essence of Perestroika as a historical phenomenon. The paper proves that the integrity and essence of this phenomenon is entirely determined by the “triple being” of Perestroika: the history of Perestroika, Perestroika as the annals of Soviet history, and Perestroika as a way to historiorize itself and Soviet history. The author singles out historical stages of Perestroika (the emergence, becoming, and development) and concludes that it begins in 1983, ends in 1993 and comes in the form of Andropov’s, Gorbachyov’s, and Eltsin’s Perestroika. In the first phase, it exists as a tuning (the refinement, renewal, acceleration of the development) of socialism. In the second, it takes a form of a fitting out with the help of democratization to a ‘better socialism’ (Gorbachyov). In the final third stage, it proceeds as the negation of Gorbachyov’s Perestroika (the tuning), Perestroika’s negligible denial of Yeltsin’s Perestroika as a form of its realization (the completion), the alienation of Perestroika from itself and socialism as a mode of being of all that exists of Soviet history (the construction). The article examines in detail the first being of Perestroika - its existence as “Being for-itself” (Sartre) “Being-as-Object” (Sartre) and “Being-Seen-by-Other” (Sartre) and justifies the need to reconstruct its beingness as “Being-Towards-Death” (Heidegger) of Soviet history.