ELI5- How did the Soviet Union collapse?
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers