Why did the Soviet Union collapse?

Question by John H: why did the Soviet Union collapse?

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Answers and Views:

Answer by Gaius Antonius Flavius
This requires a very long detailed answer, but for a fairly short one, economics and under development of their country.

The USSR based their budget on a 5 year plan. Now, think of how often we think our budget needs adjusted here in the U.S. based on crisis’s and changing events! This 5 year plan served to hamstring the USSR economy when it needed the flexibility to change.

They fought their Afganistan war in an attempt of territorial expansion. This was a long debilitating war that drained the USSR financially, as well as their space program.

In the end, they also were sattled with a 3rd world agricultural capability. They were using the same farming tatics Americans were using 100 years before.

Answer by MidNight
The economy was starting to go bad and it seemed to have the effect of inflaming ethnic tensions within the country, people started to see themselves as Ukrainian first, soviet citizens second, or Latvian first, Soviet second.The baltic states were the first to want to leave the union, they wanted to reestablish old ties to central and western Europe, and all across the USSR people wanted a higher standard of living which they hoped that capitalism might bring them and more personal freedom.

In some ways it was also a power grab my the presidents at a time when the resolve of the greater soviet government seemed week, Boris Yeltsin of Russia got together with all the other presidents of the States of the Soviet Union and basically they went to Gorbachev and said, “we are all leaving and dissolving the Union.” So I think that Yeltsin wanting more personal power over his state, Russia, the main state, may have also been a major factor.

Answer by Spellbound
The USSR collapsed for economic, social and political reasons.

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.

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.shtml

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