ELI5- How did the Soviet Union collapse?
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Ultimately it wasn’t nuclear weapons, tanks, or bombs that brought down the Soviet Union, it was economics.
“socialism did not die from natural causes: it was a suicide” – Fidel Castro
The Soviet Union had been mismanaged for decades. One of the great problems of the Soviet system was that the system was founded by extremist revolutionaries so they weren’t exactly the ideal people to be running a country.
Stalin was obsessed with maintaining his power and through his purges he eliminated anyone that stood against him or criticized him, so by extension he removed anyone from government that knew how to run anything, recognized the problems, and therefore no one was able to fix them.
As a result after Stalin died much of the Soviet Government was staffed with hard line true believers in the system and were very set in their ways. Insert “this is fine” meme.
Corruption was rampant, productivity was extremely inefficient, and the Soviet Union focused too much on macro economic products like military hardware and building factories vs making consumer goods to improve peoples lives.
The USSR also spent far too much of its economy making military equipment and exporting products to support other Communist nations and supporters abroad rather than focusing on the well being of their own people.
For example Grocery store shelves were frequently empty and your car took a decade to get made.
They were also totalitarian and didn’t tolerate any descent with a notorious secret police about.
By the 80s when ~~Nikita Khrushchev~~ Mikhail Gorbachev took over he recognized the vast problems the USSR was facing and started a process of liberalization and economic reforms. He started allowing Soviet people to have more freedom and to criticize the government.
The problem was this was decades too little too late.
The people used their new found freedom to basically over throw the Soviet Government. Things had been so bad for so long really that the only thing holding the USSR together was the secret police and threats of military force against its own people.
One by one the Soviet states collapsed and separated, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
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Imagine a giant corporation with layers upon layers upon layers of middle management and constant ass licking and top-down budget allocations and micromanaging over few layers of management.
Now multiply it by 1000.
That’s USSR economy.
Overall it did too much useless shit, not enough shit that people actually needed.
And top-down structure was extremely inflexible and not agile enough, so it failed even at basic stuff like stocking shelves in the stores.
So after huge recession leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus decided to remove the president of the USSR and reform USSR into a loosely-coupled economic alliance (CIS) with more decentralization, actual democracy and market economy.
The soviet union was made up of numerous republics. In 1991 Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia, the largest one. He proceeded to, with some mandate, dismantle the USSR from below, declaring Russia independent. By the end of 1992 the USSR was fully non-existent.
Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union.
Do not underestimate the power of the all mighty dollar, which is why the dollar standard is important for world stability and Americas interest.
Problems with economy efficiency which was ok while oil prices were $60-160, but that kicked off when they dropped in 1985 to $30-40
A LOT of reasons, firstly biggest devastation during WWII, including USRR and it’s later satelite states (like poland, east germany, ukraine etc.) They were on backfoot from the start.
Secondly, global ambitions, competing in ideological war against country, which suffered literally no industrial losses during WWII and even before that was a massive behemot.
Thirdly, economy. While authoritarian was massive advantage during times of war, due to speed and authority of governance, it was really bad in times of peace, due to tunnel vision. There’s just no way for goverment to focus on all aspects of life.
Next, costly arms race and sending unbelivable amount of goods to spar revolution in different countries around the globe, while their economy didn’t rebuild (even today, Russia didn’t recovered losses suffered almost 100 years ago)
Next, costly super-projects which didn’t provide economic growth and even dampered it.
Also, Charnobyl. Cost of similar catastrophy would cripple even USA, it sort of miracle that USRR survived for some years after that.
What else. Losing cultural war, losing allies around the world, revoults, corruption (but every country has it), lack of infrastructure in central and east part of russia, society problems (rampart alcoholism). Commiting too many resources to space race.
People seem to have covered the systemic problems but not really how the collapse itself went down.
Gorbachev, recognizing the problems in the union, set about to reform the union. Gorbachev did sweeping reforms to the political and economic systems, some successful some not but the rot was generally deep and hard to deal with. The cornerstone of his reforms however would be to rewrite the Soviet charter, the Soviet “constitution.” This led to the [1991 Soviet Referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum), which asked voters to vote yes if they want Gorbachev to rewrite the charter “to guarantee more autonomy and freedoms for constituent states” and no if they want to keep the old charter (this vote is commonly misunderstood by many as a referendum on support for the USSR, it is not, there was no option on the ballot for no USSR, it was new USSR or old USSR). Reform won a sweeping 70%.
So Gorbachev went along and started drafting up this “New Union Treaty.” A few months later a few Soviet “conservatives” (which, confusingly in this context, means people that want to conserve the former Soviet Union, aka hardline communists) decided Gorbachev went too far and attempted to coup him, managing to hold him under house arrest and while on vacation in Crimea and tried to seize power in Moscow.
This divided the Soviet government and divided the public, much of which came out in protest of this in Moscow. The coup was eventually foiled when the coupers could not get enough support in either of these groups and would have to either resort to bloodshed or stand down.
This however created a 3 day power vacuum while it all went down. The individual Soviet republics, who due to Gorbachev political reforms, recently allowed free-ish elections to be held and Soviet hardliners were largely put into the minority. With the political power of the central ussr in limbo, many Soviet republics had votes in their parliaments to declare independence, something they didn’t dare do prior to this. Gorbachev eventually took back the reigns of power in Moscow over the next weeks but the republics had already crossed the rubicon of declaring independence, Gorbachev perhaps could have tried to repress them militarily but decided it would be too bloody, with that he essentially allowed them to secede.
(U.S.) Friend of mine was admitted to study the economic system there circa 1985 or so. He described it this way: Factory A would take ball bearings that Factory B produced but for which there was zero demand. Factory A would melt down the ball bearings, send the bricks of converted metal to Factory C which would then “sell” the raw product to Factory B to make . . . more ball bearings for which there was no demand.
It was a truly politicized economy: employment at all costs, all other factors be damned.
The economy of course was a complete shitshow, but I think its faulty thinking to say that was the end all be all cause. Soviet famine in 30ies was certainly worse than economic woes of 80ies and soviet union did not collapse then.
Imho a very underestimated cause for collapse of soviet union was losing the war in Afghanistan. It destroyed the image that people had of the “invincible” red army. And much like now, Russia ran on strongman politics back then too. Reveal fundamental weakness and you pull the rug out from under your political platform.
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