Answer: It literally means "restructuring" and was a reform instituted by the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the latter half of the 1980s. It was a restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems, with the goal of making them less resricting. This recalled the NEP movement under Lenin, where there was a bit of a capitalist influence in the Soviet economy. However, the goal was never to go away from communism, it was simply to renovate it in order to make it more efficient and provide more benefits for the Soviets people. Perestroika is frequently cited as one of the reasons for the various revolutions througout the Soviet Union in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution.