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.
The Soviet Union was bad. It industrialized under Stalin, but this also involved massive repression and murder (which wasn’t required – it just happened because Stalin wanted to eliminate all threats), along with a massive slave-labor economy (the gulag). After Stalin died, the next generation of leaders were not as repressive, but after a brief bit of relaxation led to internal dissent, clamped down again (although with far less violence). In the late 60s, Brezhnev came to power. He had zero desire to reform or progress (unlike Khrushchev, the leader he replaced). He focused on the glorification of the past – specifically, the military victory in world war II. And then relied economically on the high price of oil that started in the 70s. His time was one of stagnation and corruption. You didn’t need to believe in Soviet ideas, just to agree not to dissent or make noise (in the 20s and 30s, there were a lot of true revolutionary believers!).
The old generation gave way in the mid 80s (by dying), while oil prices were collapsing . Gorbachev took over. He was faced with a state that was hollowed out by 20 years of corruption that had been propped up by oil money, and that oil money was gone. So he tried to reform. Some of that included more “openness” in society – which led people to learn more about all the crimes of Stalin and the founding members of the USSR, as well as the current levels of corruption.
Gorbachev also allowed the end of communism in Eastern Europe (meaning: no invasions to prop up unpopular regimes). All this change angered the old guard that had been aligned with Brezhnev, they didn’t want change. So they tried a coup against Gobachev. It failed, in part due to another group of politicians led by Yeltsin, who was president of Russia – a soviet state (union of soviet socialist republics). Yeltsin realized that he had a chance to sideline the USSR and concentrate power in his hands if the USSR was sidelined in favor of the individual Republics.
Also, some of the Republics were basically conquered by Stalin in 1940 and had wanted to go free for years. So there was a strong desire in some republics for independence, as well as a desire by many local power leaders to gain control free from Moscow to rule their own countries. So suddenly a major chunk of the elite saw a benefit to stepping around the USSR and having their own states.
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