I am having a hard time understanding how governments can just “collapse” like the Soviet Union, without any foreign threats. Wouldn’t an incompetent and dysfunctional government just keep up appearances and continue to operate in the background?
In: Economics
Describing it as a breakup is slightly better for understanding it than calling it a collapse, but it’s like the other comment says, it was a collection of republics that all had their own internal systems of government. Soviet means “council”, so it was a union of all those councils, or separate governments. The “collapse” was those states seceding from the union. Many of those states actually went on to sign a new agreement and joined the CIS or Commonwealth of Independent States. Resource management was an issue, so was political infighting at the top, money was short and it was spent in unbalanced ways, a good bit of it on defense spending to try to match NATO (read USA).
To answer why they didn’t just fake it and remain in the background, they couldn’t, the USSR was big in the world stage and when it collapsed it caught the world by surprise, so you could you could say that they actually probably were keeping up appearances for a while when in reality it was already kaput.
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