Collapse of Soviet Union Chou

Collapse of Soviet Union

Chou En Lai, the Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister under Mao Tze Deng, when asked to comment about the effects of the French Revolution on the European history had famously remarked, "It is too early to say." By such an analogy, analysis of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is best left to the historians of the future generations. However, a number of long and short-term factors have been identified by political commentators and historians to explain one of the pivotal events of the 20th century that has changed the history of the world. These have been discussed below:

Flawed Ideology number of people, particularly the ones who are firmly opposed to Marxism, argue that the Soviet "experiment" was doomed to fail from the start. They consider the Marxist ideology -- the very basis of the formation of the Soviet Empire -- as inherently flawed. Hence an imminent collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted by a number of Western writers from the beginning who believed that it was only a matter of time before the contradictions of an "unnatural" system caught up with it. To them the collapse of Soviet Union was no surprise; the real surprise was how it survived for such a long (74 years) period. Historian Martin Malia is the chief proponent of this theory who believes that the utopian Soviet dream of building a "maximalist" socialist society of equality and abundance was 'fatally flawed' and flew in the face of all historical precedent as well as human nature. The attempt to achieve the impossible dream through a "mixture of ideological illusion and raw coercion" was thus, "....a fragile affair, a permanent house of cards awaiting its natural fate." Little wonder that the system collapsed with a startling absence of resistance. (Quoted by Strayer, 1998, pp. 35-36)

Weakness of the Economy

Most of the territories under the Russian Empire that became the Soviet Union after the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution were underdeveloped and the majority of the population consisted of the rural poor. In the initial years, the new Socialist state made remarkable progress as the Stalinist regime transformed a backward rural economy into an industrial one. Such progress, however, was achieved at great social cost through extreme draconian measures. Victory in the Second World War, again achieved at great cost, gave the country a lot of confidence and the Soviet Union emerged as a world power in the war's aftermath. Its economy continued to grow at a satisfactory rate through the 1960s. From the 1970s onward, it began to falter and towards the end of the Brezhnev era the Soviet economy was running hidden budget deficits of 7-8% of GNP, and suffering from extreme inflation that took the form (because of price controls) of chronic shortages of consumer goods in the mid 1980s. (Lovell, 1997; "The End of the Cold War," 2003)

Push by the United States

The United States, through its own intelligence sources was aware of the economic difficulties being faced by the Soviet Union. From 1980 onwards, the Reagan administration exploited the Soviet economic vulnerability ruthlessly to hasten its collapse. It tightened controls on the export of strategic technologies to the Soviet bloc. The CIA persuaded Saudi Arabia to drive down the price of oil, which denied the U.S.S.R. The foreign exchange funds it desperately wanted to earn from its petroleum exports. The U.S. pressured its European allies to cancel or delay a major Soviet pipeline project from Siberia. It provided massive arms and strategic support to the Afghan Mujahideen to help bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. Reagan tightened the screws further by declaring the Soviet Union an 'evil empire' and upped the ante by announcing his American Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a high-tech antimissile defense system. An already strained Soviet economy that was already spending as much as 30% of its GNP on defense found this hard to match and pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy.

Gorbachev's Reforms: The "Toppling from Within"

When Gorbachev took over as Secretary General of the Communist Party in 1985, he felt that radical reforms were needed in the country to save its faltering economy. He face the classic "dictator's dilemma" of how to tackle the situation in the information age. He opted to pursue the policies of "glasnost" (openness) in political and cultural affairs and "perestroika" (restructuring) in economic affairs. The Soviet Union had been administered for the past 70 years through a tight control on information. Gorbachev's policy of openness threw open the floodgates. The Soviet people had been kept on a tight leash through tight control on information and "fear" by an oppressive government. (Kedzie, 1997) the lifting of the fear factor did not result in, as Gorbachev had hoped, improvement in the social and economic conditions within the existing system. When the ordinary people found more out about the outside world and their own history, they chose to ignore "perestroika" altogether and opted instead to change the system itself. To make matters worse, all that Gorbachev's "reforms" managed to do was to disrupt the operations of the existing planned economy, provoking a further slowdown in growth leading to widespread shortages of consumer goods. (Moorewood, 1998)