...at the time, pretty much all the international communist movement, including those who prided themselves on their 'anti-revisionism', sang the praises of Gorbachev and perestroika. So ingrained was the habit of applauding everything the CPSU did and said, that very few looked critically at the reform process and its assumptions. And even now, when there has been plenty of opportunity to analyse the weaknesses of the Soviet system and the reasons it ended the way it did, people who imagine themselves to be Marxists prefer to personalise the whole thing, and blame Gorbachev and his 'treachery'. There is not a trace of the historical materialist method in any of this. Gorbachev's failings were many, but they reflected the failings of the system which produced him, and of a party which was so ideologically hollowed out that it was prepared to swallow the banalities of his 'new thinking', and of a ruling caste which no longer believed in the economic and social order it was supposed to uphold. The USSR collapsed because the whole edifice was fundamentally rotten. Gorbachev - a relatively well-intentioned and clean-handed politician by Soviet standards - was merely a symptom of the senescence and decay of that state. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else at the helm when it collapsed.