The sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 is something of a mystery. The usual story was that the collapse was due to economic and military setbacks, and especially the high cost of competing militarily with the U.S.A. In American right-wing myth, Ronald Reagan’s military spending was a principle cause of Soviet collapse.
If I can try to synopsize the article cited above, such explanations are incorrect. Instead, sincere leaders led by Gorbachev instituted liberal policies like freedom of speech and, now free to acknowledge its own flaws, the system imploded.
The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was unsound. When Jimmy Carter initiated the boycott of the 1980 Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, they ran out of money. The Soviet Union would have collapsed a year later, except that Ronald Reagan became president and started giving the Soviets wheat paid for with our tax dollars. This allowed them to stumble along in their failing economy for several more years. During this time the Soviets began to relax the totalatarian control of their country in order to maintain trade with the ‘free world’. This wasn’t sufficient to keep afloat an enormous country that had to spend more than they could produce just to feed their people. Any analysis that does not focus on the reasons why the Soviet Union did not collapse sooner is garbage.
It sounds to me like the author of the article is too much of a theorist and not enough of a pragmatist.
The Soviet Union went broke. It was the international bankers that brought it down. The ruble was not an international currency like the dollar, the pound or the mark. It was overvalued by the Soviets but nobody wanted it. So what does that matter?
Globalization mattered. The Soviets had dumped too much of their resources into their mechanized military. Meanwhile they fell far behind in computer technology. The only way to catch up was to buy the technology on the international market but nobody wanted their money because it was worthless. The inefficiencies in their system left them with little to export that anybody wanted except for some bombs and Kalashnikov rifles. They couldn’t even export food, they had to import it.
The author is right in that corruption was a factor. The communist system, by it’s nature, always leads to corruption. Look at Cuba for example. People can’t survive without the black market.
I know I am oversimplifying but you should get the point.
The followers of St. Ronnie try to claim that he made it happen. Actually, he was just around at the time.
Let’s keep in mind when Reagan gave his speech saying that Communism was doomed to the dustbin of history, there were plenty of liberals who went beserk. Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, whose newspaper still brags about the Pulitzer prize that Walter Duranty got for covering up Uncle Joe Stalin mass murders, was ballistic. Henry Steele Commager of Dartmouth fumed that he had read every Presidential speech and this was the worst. None of them were saying we know this is just about to happen.
Whatever, but the point is that the Berlin Wall falling had zippo to do with Reagan’s speech. As if that really scared them. Yeah! It was already crumbling. If anything, credit for dissolving the Soviet Union goes to the bankers, as nasty and self-serving as they are. St. Ronnie’s role was minimal.
The USSR would have collapsed by the mid-1970’s…except that the Arab oil embargo boosted the price of oil. The extra cash kept the whole mess running.
Really, it was obvious that the USSR was failing badly, by the 1960’s (the Russians had to sell gold to buy food).
The final collapse came about because the Afghan war bankrupted them…as it is bankrupting us:smack:
Also, did it ever occur to you that maybe it was a crappy speech? Reagan talked to the populace on a third grade level. Unfortunately, that’s what got him elected. A populace that could only understand the complexities of the world on a third grade level and believed what they were being told by a snake oil salesman even if it was total BS. I fear that looking toward 2012 we are at the same point. At our peril.
BTW, the NY Times also covered up the lies of the Bush administration that got us into the Gulf War II debacle. Don’t go back 60 years, go back 10 years.
To those respondents who’ve said the USSR’s collapse was just (or mostly) due to economics…why? I’m not saying it wasn’t so (I don’t really know), but where’s the evidence? Lots of countries have terrible economies but don’t go through complete political revolutions. Cuba’s economy is terrible, but the Communist party is still in power there. China’s economy was in shambles due to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but the Communists are still in control there, too. I don’t even need to mention North Korea.
So surely there must have been something else, right? Why not the moral argument that the author of the FP article seems to be making?
The Soviet Union was bankrupt from the very start (they kick-started with a civil war) by ordinary standards, but Lenin and Stalin were able to run a very separated country, so it did not matter.
When they conquered an empire in WWII and started to actively spread communism to other continents, the contacts increased and as a result they little by little developed instances were they needed money or even wealth (AKA non-rubble money). The leaders had invested a lot of prestige in this empire, so some resources went needlessly to satellites to keep the local dictators, their armies, police and people happy. At the same time, the premise that communism will surpass capitalism in the near future was maintained, so the standard of living at home could not be lowered to the Stalin-era level.
For the timing, the most important thing was the change of generation. It is impossible to estimate how long someone like Brezhnev or Chernenko could have continued digging deeper in that hole, but it is certain they would have tried. Gorbatchev was of the younger generation and it was his personal decision to start the reforms right then.
Any theory about why the USSR collapsed has to take into account the following evidence:
(1) The day before it happened, no one was predicting the event. I know people who were in Moscow for an international library conference the week that the tanks rolled out in the streets, and did nothing while people demonstrated and the Soviet government folded. So, whatever caused it, that was not obvious immediately prior to the event.
(2) When the USSR collapsed, there were still effective governments in the constituent republics of the union, including Russia. So those who allowed it to happen knew that there wasn’t likely to be a descent into anarchy.
(3) There had been increased liberalisation in the Soviet government from the death of Stalin in 1953, generally allowing more and more freedom in the USSR and in its satellites. Without that, the collapse could not have happened peacefully.
There are other factors mentioned earlier in this thread, but I think these three are pretty important in working out what happened. (And Saint Ronald Reagan didn’t have much to do with any of them.)