Why did Soviet Union break up? What exactly went wrong?
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The USSR was a large ’empire’ that spanned many decades, so there were many factors that lead to its breakup, but at a broader level, the biggest issue for them was that their highly centralized economic system was not particularly productive, and couldn’t keep up with their western rivals.
The Soviet Union was basically created and grown by Russia invading other countries and then pretty much just telling them that they were part of the USSR now. One of the realities of having an empire like that is that it comes with costs. Administrative costs, military costs, and so on.
By the 80’s the Soviets were having a really hard time keeping up with those costs, because their economy was so far behind the US/Europe/Japan/Etc. The standard of living for most of their citizens was significantly less. They had pretty good internal propaganda that hid some of that fact, but the expansion of global media was making the discrepancy more visible to their citizens.
Some of the Soviet leadership realized that they needed to try to make some changes if they hoped to catch up or at least not fall further behind. There were attempts by some in the leadership to make some economic reforms and start to ‘open up’ to the west. These reform attempts met a lot of push-back from others in the leadership, and there was a lot of political turmoil as a result, including a failed coup attempt.
By the late 80’s it was so much of a political and economic mess that some of the countries that had been part of the USSR wanted out, and Russia wasn’t in a situation where it could effectively force them to stay in anymore. And so they started declaring independence and over the course of a few years the Soviet Union was no more.
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