Uskorenie (Russian: ускорение, IPA: [ʊskɐˈrʲenʲɪɪ̯ə]; literally meaning acceleration) was a slogan and a policy announced by Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on 20 April 1985 at a Soviet Party Plenum, aimed at the acceleration of political, social and economic development of the Soviet Union.
It was the first slogan of a set of reforms that also included perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (transparency), new political thinking, and demokratizatsiya (democratization).
[2] In May 1985, Gorbachev delivered a speech in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), during which he admitted the slowing down of the economic development and inadequacy of living standards.
[3] In practice it was implemented with the help of massive monetary emission infused into heavy industry, which further destabilised the economy and in particular brought an enormous disparity between actual cash money and virtual money used in cashless clearings (Russian: безналичный расчёт, romanized: beznalichnyi raschet) between enterprises and state and among enterprises.
The politics of mere "acceleration" eventually failed, which was de facto admitted at the June 1987 Party Plenum, and the uskorenie slogan was phased out in favor of the more ambitious perestroika (restructuring of the whole economy).