Why did Soviet Union break up? What exactly went wrong?
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People tend to overcomplicate this a bunch with all sorts of other variables when it’s actually pretty simple:
In the 80’s as part of liberalizing reforms, individual soviet states were granted expanded levels of power at the expense of the central government (in theory to allow states to better tailor policies). Thus for example the leader of Russia became individually powerful relative to the central soviet government.
Eventually, as crisis’ grew these now powerful state leaders turned against the central government and broke up the union.
While people talk a lot about economic issues or other liberalisation, none of these really matter as much as the devolution of power away from the supreme soviet as the actual direct cause of the unions failure.
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