Question by James: What had a bigger impact in the collapse of the Soviet union?
President Reagan zeroing in on the USSR or Gorbachev creating glasnost and perestroika?
To whichever position you believe deserves more credit, explain why?
and why you think the other position didn’t have as big of an impact
Answers and Views:
Answer by Spellbound
Reagan 5%, Gorbachev 95%.
The problems were economic, social and political.
Economic:
The economy had been stagnating throughout the 1970s, as Western economies moved into new technologies, the Soviets economy was based on Karl Marx’s analysis of the British economy in the mid 19th Century. The Soviets focused on heavy industry – coal, iron and steel production, to the detriment of consumer goods. Soviet made consumer goods were rare, expensive and very poorly made. Soviet agriculture was always inefficient, and these inefficiencies meant that the Soviets had to import grain from the US & Canada several times in the 1970s – hitting their export / import balance sheet. Added to this was the increase in defence spending brought about by Reagan’s SDI programme.
Social:
The Soviet Union faced two huge problems in the 1970s & 1980s.
1) The rise of Samizdat literature and dissident activity. Many writers began to “self-publish”, using new, cheap, office photocopiers and mimeographs. On their own this was not to much of a problem, but as these works were circulated, so the idea that there were alternatives to the Soviet way began to make ground across the USSR.
2) Jewish refuseniks. Jews were, and are, allowed to move to Israel. The USSR refused exit visa to thousands of Jews who wanted to leave – this led to embarrassingly long queues at Israeli missions – these were shown on Soviet TV. The problem was “why would anyone want to leave the “workers’ paradise”?”. Once people began to question why the Jews wanted to leave, then they too began to question what alternatives to the Soviet way there might be. This led to a rise in nationalist sentiment in many of the Soviet Republics.
Political:
Brezhnev, and his co-ruler Kosygin, thought that all Khrushchev achieved was chaos, they wanted to stabilise the country and to reverse nearly all the reforms of Khrushchev. Probably the worst thing, for the Soviet Union, that they did was the policy of “stability of cadres”. This policy was a response to Khrushchev’s policy of moving bureaucrats around and promoting and demoting people. It had the effect of creating an ageing political class, who sought only to maintain their position. By the late 1970s the country was a gerontocracy – a country ruled by the elderly.
This exasperated the conservative communist government’s hostility towards the youth, which, in turn, meant that when the regime was tottering they could not rely on the idealism of the young.
See:
Khrushchev Remembers – NS Khrushchev
The Soviet Union 1917 – 1991 – Martin McCauley
The Revolution from Above by David M Kotz and Fred Weir
http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1985perestroika&Year=1985
http://www.historyorb.com/russia/intro.php
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