I tend to agree with mrblue92. As part of my politics degree I studied Soviet and post-Soviet politics for a year. This was several years ago, and alcohol has killed a few brain cells since, so apologies if what follows seems a little vague or has a few holes.
The initial drivers of the collapse were economic. As already said, the Russian economy was being pushed to compete with the West’s, especially militarily. Research, development and industry was geared towards military production at the expense of maintaining the social infrastructure. Central planning was inherently inefficient at organising production and transporting goods and materials. Wastage was enormous.
Add to that the influence of glasnost and perestroika in opening the eyes of many Russians to the comparative grimness of the situation and a degree of social collapse was no surprise. Trying to rush in a capitalist economy was the equivalent of forcing a square peg into a round hole.
The relative success of Lech Walensa and Solidarity in Poland occurred may also have sparked a degree of independent thought among the other Warsaw Pact nations later on, particularly when Gorbachev’s Russia was starting to look nervously inwards and realise that the Cold War had left it ill-equipped to deal with a more peaceful situation.
it was the Chernobyl disaster that did them in . At least, that was the last straw for most of them. Doesn’t anybody remember how the USSR fell just a short time afterwards ?
I think the environment player a large roll in the Soviet Union’s collapse. Chernobyl pissed off the Soviet citizenry and finished the Soviet State. More because the bugling of the leadership in the immediate aftermath more then anything. Plus factories in the Soviet Union had zero environmental controls.
As far as SDI goes, it was a joke. Ask any one who knows anything about computers or nuclear weapons any they can tell you that this was a propoganda weapon and nothing else.
I agree that Chernobyl started the collapse of the Soviet house of cards. A terrible natural disaster, a government scandal, Chernobyl will be one of the great wonders of the world for thousands of years to come. History should perhaps make it the monument to Communism. I also noticed similarities could be drawn between the recent Russian submarine disaster and Chernobyl. A fumbled disaster, inept reaction, cover-up and secrecy, a nation in mourning for a terrible loss of life. Russia lost many millions of young men in World War II and tens of thousand of young men died after working on the Chernobyl clean-up. The death toll in Chechnya, the submarine disaster, the Russian people have a tragic past.
Olentzero, let me try and translate your impressive phonetic Russian ( I have no formal Russian language training, just what little I taught myself. I can’t believe there are people crazy enough to teach themselves Klingon.):
“Privet, ty tam! Esli ty kogda-nibud’ sobiraesh’sa priexat’ v Vashingtone, skazhi mne i budem vypit’ paru butylok. Chto skazesh’?”
Hello, you there! If you ever go (to, near?) Washington (contact) me and we will drink some bottles. what (do you think)?"
So its decline can also be measured by the underground distribution of the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.
Essentially, the people of Eastern Europe freed themselves - although it would not have happened by now if not for the opposition to the Soviet empire by the U.S. and its allies.
Of course one can look at the U.S. current staunch opposition to Red China - and all those cheap Chinese gulag goods on sale now at Wal-Mart.
But the true cause of the Soviet collapse was the military service of George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Take a bow, boys.
It was clearly the firm stand President Carter made by boycotting the 1980 Olympics. Once that happened, the collapse of the entire Soviet system was inevitable.
Don’t buy that? Why not? It makes as much sense as the idea that Reagan somehow caused the Soviet Union to collapse three years after he had left office.
I think many of the causes mentioned already did contribute to the collapse, but one more thing which should get some credit was the detente policy instituted by Nixon and Kissinger. By opening up contact between the West and the Soviet bloc it led to a new generation of Soviet middle managers who were not captives of the old propoganda. They could see that there were alternatives to the status quo; that the West was not as the Politboro portrayed it. They were the ones who supported Gorbachev’s reforms, and who refused to support the attempted coup against him.
While Reagan’s and Thatcher’s hard line against the “evil empire” was important, it was also important that it was preceded by a decade of closer contact to allow some western ideas to seep in.
There has always been contact. The USSR leaders knew about the alternative. As mentioned by others (including me), I’m convinced that it was just a new and more intelligent breed of individuals who, FINALLY, were able to lift themselves above the mentality of the Stalin era, starting with Gorbachev, and his peristroka (sp?) and glasnost. Gorbachev allowed the Berlin wall to be torn down and that was the beginning of the end of the USSR. Gorbachev could have been overthrown by the coup, but Yeltsin came to his aid. One good thing he did. The world is lucky that Gorbachev and Yeltsin came along when they did. I don’t know about Putin. But the genie is out of the bottle and I don’t think it can be put back in.
I don’t think that anybody on this side of the ocean can particularly take credit for the demise of the USSR.
Someone at a conference somewhere asked Margaret Thatcher why the Soviet Union collapsed. She answered “Ronald Reagan and SDI/”
There is an endless list of reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed, and they all worked together. I think Thatcher’s point was that Reagan took and stuck to a hard stand at just the right time. In and of itself, it might not have worked, but she felt SDI and Reagan were the straws that broke the Soviet Union’s back.