If economic reform was the ‘key to all our problems’ at the outset of Gorbachev's administration and political reform increasingly the means by which it was to be accomplished, the ultimate objective remained the achievement of a form of socialism which advanced decisively on those that had preceded it. Gorbachev described this vision at the April 1985 plenum, hardly in the most memorable of terms, as a ‘qualitatively new state [sostoyanie] of society’. Elsewhere he referred to it as ‘developing socialism’, differentiating it from the ‘developed socialism’ that was supposed to have been constructed in the Brezhnev era and still more so from the Utopian vision of a society rapidly advancing towards full communism that had been current in the Khrushchev years. Still later, from 1990 onwards, the emphasis shifted to ‘humane, democratic socialism’. And yet six years into the new administration, or even after it, the nature of Gorbachevian socialism remained frustratingly elusive. What kind of society did he envisage, beyond some rather vacuous generalities? Was the vision a coherent and convincing one? And how was it to be achieved – was there agreement about it within the leadership and the wider society, and did a political agency exist that could bring it into being?