Why did Soviet Union break up? What exactly went wrong?
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There’s several reasons. Though when governments collapse, the reasons tend to be less about the chronology of specific events, and more about the megatrends. So what are the megatrends of the Russian empire?
Most Russian history can be explained by the fact that even though Russia is gigantic, Moscow is actually an extremely vulnerable place to set up a power center. By vulnerable, I mean at risk of invasion and conquest by enemies from European continent and from central Asia. Moscow has repeatedly been threatened, attacked, or outright sacked by armies on horseback through the Steppes or in tanks from the Northern European plain. For defense, they don’t have mountains like Switzerland, or a Channel like the UK, or a desert like China to help keep them out.
So what they lack in natural defenses to *stop* their adversaries, they make up for in land to *slow* their adversaries. The further west and south Russia can extend its borders out from Moscow towards natural barriers like the Caucasus Mountains, the Carpathian Mountains, Black, Caspian, and Baltic Seas, the more time Russia would have to mobilize its large, sparse population to meet the invader before they can set torch to Moscow.
The trouble is, the lands to the west and south are full of non-Russian peoples. Balts, Tatars, Cossacks, Caucasians, Poles, Kazakhs, and various other Slavic, Turkic, and Asiatic nations, etc etc. Muscovite Russia, with its large population and ability to mobilize, has at times conquered and held these territories peoples, and at other times had difficulty constraining them from uprisings and nationalist movements. Inherent, built-in tension.
But it goes beyond just tension of desire for self-government. Moscow is at the same latitude as Newfoundland. Its growing season sucks, and what food they can grow for themselves is often cost prohibitive to actually transport across vast distances before it spoils.
So Moscow leaders have a choice; option 1 is high food costs and urban starvation in the heartland, and weak control over restive nationalist movements. Option 2 is exploitation of conquered peoples by forcing them to supply and ship food at below market rates to Moscow, causing their economic destitution. Moscow tends to choose the latter for obvious reasons of self-interest.
This results in a situation where Moscow must spend exorbitantly on coercion – a giant state bureaucracy and security apparatus that forces conquered people to pay for their own subjugation in order to keep the empire united. The math, unfortunately, works out, which meant a rationale profit motive to maintain the arrangement. And maintain they did – at least in one form or another. Various waves of expansion and contraction of this model in the form of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union continued for centuries. So what caused the Soviet Union to contract?
1) Was overextension into Central and Eastern Europe. The distances became too large. The scale too big. The necessary spending on state security services, secret police, military garrisons, inefficient and long logistical/transport networks. What used to be a net profit became a net loss, and organizations cannot maintain a net loss indefinitely
2) They frightened Europe and the US into massive military buildup in Germany. They had to respond with a buildup of their own, the maintenance of which put them on an economic pacing challenge, where they were at an inherent disadvantage. That is, their logistical network was too large and too expensive, their maritime trade too difficult, and their industrial base too remedial to leverage the resources needed to meet the challenge, which is related to;
3) Because they could not win the economic pacing challenge to directly match the military threat, they instead had to compete in a technical military arms race against far richer countries. This required diverting intellectual and material resources to it. This meant that all the smart, capable people, and too much of the funding, were increasingly sent to the military-industrial complex and *not* on the civilian and administrative complex.
As a result, over time the ability of the state to perform its basic functions deteriorated. Resources needed to keep the fundamental internal security arrangement of the empire grew scarcer and scarcer. In 1989 they finally failed to contain popular uprisings and dissent in Eastern Europe, and were forced to withdraw. By 1991, amid coup attempts in Moscow that blamed mismanagement and bad policies for their growing woes (though frankly, superficial given the megatrends), various SSRs declared their independence. And soon after the USSR itself dissolved.
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