Why Did Soviet Communism Collapse?

[Ahazmaksya]

My class at the moment is focusing on the downfall of communism, and I'm here because I would like some background information.

Can you give me your opinions/links on the internal reasons for the collapse (socially, politically economically), and do you feel that external committments (Afghanistan, Arms Race) played an important part in the failure of communism?

Thanks

[StevenNr1]

Main reasons are the cold war and the bureaucracy.

[Subversive Pessimist]

The USSR wasn't communist. It was based on socialist principles.


To answer your question, why the Soviet Union went down:

THE RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION. (http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html)

[ComradeChris]

Mainly because it wasn't anywhere near communist, like ComradeStrawberry said. It wasn't self-sufficient (relied too much on it's satelite states). The Cold War. And the rulers didn't want to give up power. Those are my main reason.

[Mahir Çayan]

Gorbachev brought the revisionist agenda to a head, however, it had reared its ugly head upon the death of Stalin but perhaps sinister revisionist feelings were prominent among party members such as Kruschev since the beginning.

[Non-Sectarian Bastard!]

You know the saying.

Power corrupts people.

[Subversive Pessimist]

I don't think power corrupted Ernesto Guevara, Non-Sectarian Bastard!

[Andrei Kuznetsov]

When it fell in 1991, the Soviet Union had be a Capitalist country since 1956. Khrushchev's reforms had rendered the Soviet economy into one where profit was the main motive behind all production within the nation. Various bureaucrats, ministers, and Party cadre were given economic benefits and basically became the "CEO's" and "Chairmans" of the various state corporations with the Soviet government and Party. When competition amongst these various gainings of capital/profit began, it disunified the revisionist superstructure and slowly began to wear away at it. The Soviet-Afghan War, over-concentrating on militarization, and the overcompetition between the various state-capitalists sent the USSR into an economic depression. Eventually, the political base was so unstable that the disguise of "Socialism" (no matter how much Gorbachev tried to stretch it) had become basically impossible to keep up; the various bourgeoisie within each Soviet Socialist Republic (combined with various ethnic strifes) split as their facade crumbled, and social-imperialist, revisionist, state capitalism gave in to Western imperialist, openly-bourgeois, laissez-faire Capitalism.

When Khrushchev took power, much of the managers and ministers in charge of the new, decentralized regional economic councils known as the sovnarkhozi were given enormous amounts of power as well as various bureaucrats within the other economic bureaus and ministries. Thus, while it seemed like the land and factories belonged to the masses, and although "officially" the economy was Socialist, in reality (the key word here) most resources were in the hands of various individuals within the national government, Party, and governments within the various republics. Indeed, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had become a new ruling class and a new bourgeoisie. They may have said that they opposed privatization, but in reality the only thing they opposed was open privatization and privatization outside the Party and Government (and this didn't change really until Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost).

It was not so much the collapse as a changing of masks, in my opinion... I actually did a two-part essay on why the USSR was capitalist from 1956 to 1991 here: http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?t=28588

[Andrei Kuznetsov]

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention the importance of the Cold War!

The capitalist world was divided into two great war blocs for twenty years -- the U.S.-led NATO bloc and the Soviet Bloc.

The Soviet bloc had an industrial base a third the size of the Western Bloc, and did not have as much access to the superprofits of the Third World (and in fact, GETTING that access to neocolonial profits was exactly one of the motivations of the Soviet imperialists in the Cold War- e.g. Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, etc.).

This meant that the burdens of maintaining war-ready military parity were exceptionally heavy on the Eastern Bloc. (In one famous quote from a "Soviet expert", it was said "The U.S. has a military-industrial complex, the Soviet Union is a military industrial complex.

In other words, the inter-imperialist confrontation, the semi-permanent and escalating state of war preparation, put tremendous political and economic strains on the Soviet Union. When war did not come, and when neither side proved willing to actually go for the nukes, it turned into a drawn out economic contest... and the smaller bloc fell apart -- economically and politically. They backed off their geo-political goals and demands. And they changed the form of their capitalist system. The state-monopoly-capitalism of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko years was transformed to a somewhat more privatized monopoly capitalism.

But fundamentally (i.e. in a class sense) there was no change of power. the previous state-monopoly-capitalist class transformed (legalized) itself as a new private monopoly capitalist class (called "the enfranchizement of the nomenklatura"). The previous managers of huge corporate "ministries" suddenly emerged as the OWNERS of streamlined Western-style corporations (carved out of the most potentially profitable parts of those ministries).

New cliques came to power, but most of them too were simply rebirths of old revisionists. Yeltsin, Putin, Schevardnaze, etc. etc. are all just old rulers with slightly modified rhetoric, and a program of privatized imperialism.

In almost every one of the Eastern European and formerly Soviet countries, the new rulers are former leaders of the old revisionist-state-capitalist parties.

In other words, under the weight of the Cold War, and the permanent war economy, the Soviet Union "blinked first" in the big staring contest -- and massive changes were carried out BY ITS OLD RULING CLASS in the way they did business -- all to regroup, to salvage what they could, to regain some political legitimacy, to restructure their economy, and eventually to reemerge anew on the world scale as an imperialist contender- the Russian Federation as we know it today.

[Digitalism]

i was just reading some comments from another site and here's what one guy wrote

"From my SPS studies of Communism thus far, I would offer two explanations, 1 theoretical, the other historical:

1) the state needed to be dissolved in order to enter the final stage of communism Marx foresaw. This should really have been done after Stalin's death as under him all the necessary economic reform set forth in the communist manifesto (eg industrialisation, collectivisation, nationalisation) were achieved. As this collapse didn't happen but the state had nowhere left to go it meant an ideological wall the state came up against.

2) if the state didn't dissolve, state socialism could have been continued if managed by competent and visionary leaders. Though Khruschev was reasonably competent, Brezhnev was disastrous; incompetent, deluded, unintelligent and totally lacking in any of the qualities needed for leadership.

These overwhelming deficiencies meant that he just sat back and ignored the mounting economic troubles of Stagflation instead of taking the direct fiscal action needed."

just wondering on your opinion.

[Q]

i was just reading some comments from another site and here's what one guy wrote

"From my SPS studies of Communism thus far, I would offer two explanations, 1 theoretical, the other historical:

1) the state needed to be dissolved in order to enter the final stage of communism Marx foresaw. This should really have been done after Stalin's death as under him all the necessary economic reform set forth in the communist manifesto (eg industrialisation, collectivisation, nationalisation) were achieved. As this collapse didn't happen but the state had nowhere left to go it meant an ideological wall the state came up against.

2) if the state didn't dissolve, state socialism could have been continued if managed by competent and visionary leaders. Though Khruschev was reasonably competent, Brezhnev was disastrous; incompetent, deluded, unintelligent and totally lacking in any of the qualities needed for leadership.

These overwhelming deficiencies meant that he just sat back and ignored the mounting economic troubles of Stagflation instead of taking the direct fiscal action needed."

just wondering on your opinion.
First of all: congrats on some serious digging.

Secondly, I only partly agree with your quote. While it is true the Russia was becoming quite an economic powerhouse, it wasn't an economy that surpassed capitalism as being a better way of production. This was due to the fact that the planned economy wasn't democratically controlled by the workers, but bureaucratically by a parasitic stratum. This worked as a brake on further development and eventually to stagnation in the early eighties which led to the political crisis and collapse of the SU.

But also a different thing. The "state" as Marx defined it is an instrument of class oppression. We currently live in a society where the bourgeoisie is in power and since they are a tiny minority, they need a very authoritarian state apparatus. A workers state on the other hand is where the working class, the vast majority of society, is in power. Once the bourgeoisie is disowned from its economic fundament, it will eventually dissolve as a social class. With this, the workers state, a direct democracy, will dissolve aswell and eventually stops being a "state" since there is no class to oppress any more.

This is fundamentally different from the state apparatus of the Soviet Union after the bureaucratic degeneration was completed. It's true that there was no economic fundament for the bureaucracy to play a role, as the economy was socialised. It therefore was a socalled "bonapartistic" state and it needed to use totalitarian force to ensure its reign of power.

[BIG BROTHER]

But why did the soviet economy had so much trouble? Why was there scarcity in the soviet Union?

[Psy]

But why did the soviet economy had so much trouble? Why was there scarcity in the soviet Union?
Industry was highly uneven. On one hand you had prototypes that was cutting edge, while many industries still were dealing with obsolete equipment.

There was a story of Zelenograd (the heart of USSR electronic research) having revolutionary IC prototypes (for the time) yet the State Planning Commission preventing mass production till the next plan, by that time Zelenograd had even better IC prototypes. The State Planning Commission couldn't keep up with USSR (and satellites) R&D. There is also stories factory managers cheating to meet the plan, there is a joke where the State Planning Commission asks for 7 tons of nails so they get one 7 ton nail.

[BIG BROTHER]

So pretty much the industry was somewhat obsolete?

[Psy]

So pretty much the industry was somewhat obsolete?
Here is video of car factory in the DDR Trabant Car - Factory Zwickau East Germany (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRX7E0yZxh0)

While we are looking at the end of the line where they are repairing defects, look at the primitive tools they are using.

[Awful Reality]

It failed because towards the 70's and onward it became a Stamocap bureaucracy, with uneven wages and managers competing with each other.

[Dros]

This should answere a lot of your questions:

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/gorbach.htm

That and also the fact that the revisionists who seized power after Stalin's death brought the country back towards capitalism.

[BIG BROTHER]

Industry was highly uneven. On one hand you had prototypes that was cutting edge, while many industries still were dealing with obsolete equipment.

There was a story of Zelenograd (the heart of USSR electronic research) having revolutionary IC prototypes (for the time) yet the State Planning Commission preventing mass production till the next plan, by that time Zelenograd had even better IC prototypes. The State Planning Commission couldn't keep up with USSR (and satellites) R&D. There is also stories factory managers cheating to meet the plan, there is a joke where the State Planning Commission asks for 7 tons of nails so they get one 7 ton nail.

Yeah I've read a little about how there was trouble with production quotas in industries. Whose fault was this though? And how should a socialist country prevent this from happening?

[Holden Caulfield]

It failed because towards the 70's and onward it became a Stamocap bureaucracy, with uneven wages and managers competing with each other.

any pretence for egalitatianism was scrapped in the 30's,
although on average for the SU; 'Red Managers' made say 4 times their employees wages where as Western ones were making about 16 times,

[ComradeOm]

Why was there scarcity in the soviet Union?One reason was the fact that prices have to be manually adjusted in a command economy. To quote a recent (well... November) post I made on Soviet pricing mechanisms:

"An additional factor, one that I don't believe has been mentioned, was the artificially low prices of most/all consumer goods. The absence of market mechanisms ensured that, along with everything else, inflation had to be manually adjusted. For a variety of reasons this was a problematic issue and the end result was that the retail price of most consumables remained far too low. Attempts to correct this with periodic increases often ran into difficulties - note the 1970 riots in Poland (that led to the fall of Gomułka) that accompanied a large readjustment of food prices.

With prices being kept so low it was not surprising that demand soared and shortages resulted. Imagine if Armani suddenly began selling suits for €10 and you have a similar scenario. This, coupled with the difficulty in forecasting demand, was the major cause of the shortages in the planned economy"

[lombas]

One of the most important factors I believe brought down the USSR was the lack of investment in the economic and political sectors.

[Awful Reality]

This explains it well. (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/gorbach.htm)

[Awful Reality]

My class at the moment is focusing on the downfall of communism, and I'm here because I would like some background information.

Can you give me your opinions/links on the internal reasons for the collapse (socially, politically economically), and do you feel that external committments (Afghanistan, Arms Race) played an important part in the failure of communism?

Thanks

That's interesting, because I don't remember communism as ever existing.