why did socialism in russia collapsed?

[rahul]

why do you actually think that socialism/communism in russia have fallen to such a bad state? did lenin expect this?why actually USSR broken?

[CubanFox]

From a thread in "New To It All":


Originally posted by "CubanFox"
When Konstantin Chernenko kicked the bucket in early '85, Mikhail Gorbachev took power in the USSR. He was committed to perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). However, unlike Boris Yeltsin, he wanted to preserve the USSR while making it freer, from a civil liberties point of view.

With glasnost, the KGB had many of its powers taken away, and freedom of speech and press (hell, the Komsomol newspaper was banned in Czechoslovakia!) was allowed. Gorbachev wanted to make the peoples of the Soviet Union happy, so that he could preserve the country. Sadly, he did the exact opposite,

He opened the can of worms that is nationalism and anti-Russianism, particularly in the Baltic republics (the Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian SSRs), which Stalin had annexed in 1940. A faltering Soviet economy provided a scapegoat for the nationalists, the exact thing they wanted to blame all their woes on: Russians.

And then, he opened an even bigger can of worms. Nationalism in the Eastern Bloc. With the Sinatra Doctrine that Gorbachev issued promising that the Red Army would not interfere, East Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians and Czechoslovakians rose up against their governments and ended socialism in Eastern Europe. This sparked a "hey, if the Poles/Romanians/East Germans can do it, why can't we Turkmen/Estonians/Armenians?" mentality.

The proverbial ideological screws that were keeping the Soviet Union together were shot to pieces when the press announced the crimes of previous leaders. The peoples of the Soviet Union were losing faith.

In the face of a growing political maelstrom, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave up its monopoly on politics on February 7, 1990. On March 11, Lithuania declared independence. Within a year, the other republics declared independence, and the Soviet Union fell like a house of cards.

Today, 25% of Russians live below the poverty line, and the GDP has halved since the USSR's collapse. Many people in former republics like Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan still live as if it were 1400.

Though many terrible things collapsed with the USSR, many good things fell too. Education and healthcare being hit especially hard. So, in the end, the event was neither a great victory nor a great defeat for anybody.

[Karo de Perro]

"why do you actually think that socialism/communism in russia have fallen to such a bad state? did lenin expect this?why actually USSR broken" ...


To answer this quickly and honestly ... socialism/communism has not fallen to a bad state in Russia and this because there never was socialism/communism existing in Russia ... what took place in Russia was a peoples revolution out of which emerged a harsh dictatorship passing itself off as a socialist/communist state.

Answer me this ... if communism is,as with the thought of anarchy,the idea of a stateless society then how the hell could there ever be such a thing as a communist state? ... its a fuckin misnomer in that one nulifies the other.

[Misodoctakleidist]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25 2004, 11:28 AM
did lenin expect this?
Yes, he called it the capitalist transition stage, he even mentioned Boris Yeltsin in name long before he was even born such were Lenin's prophetical capabilities.

Lenin wasn't a genius, get over it.

[Fidel Castro]

CubanFox pretty much covered it all with that extract.

I also think that the "Cold War" took it's toll on the Soviets. Unlike in the US, military expansion didn't stimulate economic boom in the USSR.

The USSR collapsed because of discontent and failings from within, it was a Socialist experiment that failed, in the end not defeated by the US enemy, but by it's own failings.

[Never Forget, Never Surrender]

The Soviets tried to establish a socialist model in the beginning. The actual Soviets (workers councils) were on there way to establishing some kind of market based, communal economy in the urban areas.

Then the Party came in, pushed aside the first democratic institutions Russia had ever seen, and established the same kind of command economy that Russia had before 1917. In the end, that's why the USSR fell. They couldn't compete with a command economy in the global market. They brought a Model T to the Indy 500.

The things the Soviet's pulled off were amazing (economic, military growth) but the whole system was doomed to fail. That's the thing I don't think a lot of leftists understand: we aren't fighting against the market system. We're fighting for CONTROL of the market system. It's a point that the Russians, Chinese, Brits, Norwegians, et all should have drilled into us now, but we don't seem to get it.

The economic sluggishness of the Russian economy (read command economy) caused a political crisis at home and abroad. As was said, the "colonies" smelled a chance and got the hell out of Dodge. Back in Moscow, the Command Economy folks and the Market folks had a shootout. Market won and robbed the place blind.

[rahul]

a man who visited USSR boarder during 1986 met me.
he said that "when i saw the condition of USSR i expected that its going to collapse in comming days....there was ree trade,people took communism as a chance and bagged much money.they smuggled goods and io found the condition was very worse"

"i feel sad that USSR have collapsed as i am a rationalist......................."

he said me.

he even told me that the soviets used to have undergrounds where they used to pray andhave churches.


and USSR have collapsed

[kami888]

come on rahul, there is another thread just like this! couldn't you just checked the active thread list?

[nakba]

i blame the revisionists..


and also the constant western capitalist attempts to destroy the soviet union trough history...

[Kurai Tsuki]

An important part of it is the production of missiles that took away from the production of other goods and services, the U.S. knew that keeping the arms race going would weaken the Russian infrastructure because many needed resources would be allocated to the wrong areas of production.

<edit>And then there&#39;s Stalin who used Lenin&#39;s philosophies to justify his own authorotariansim.