what destroyed the soviet union - what did it

[BRIN]

i was wondering what destroyed it

[Pete]

The main part was that the polituburo stopped listening to the people and did things that they did not agree with, and they voted to leave it.

[chamo]

I doubt that economy was a main factor in the break-down as it was still going strong by the fall of the wall and still had a higher GDP than today's Russia.
Methinks that the solidarity movement and the pressure from America caused the fall apart as well as many corrupt and unjust leaders/tyrants such as Brezhnev and Joey Stalin.

[Just Joe]

no Socialism without democracy. no democracy without Socialism.

that pretty much sums up the USSR. the whole idea of extending democracy to the economical sphere, is that you have it in the political sphere also.

true, the economy was still going ok, but it ran out of ideas. the only people with any real power were the Politburo. such a democratic machine like the planned economy needs mass input. If youre scared about gettin a knock on the door from the KGB when you point out the economys faults, youre gonna keep your mouth shup aren't you. If someone other than the geezers in the Politburo had a say, someone would have told Brezhnev that he had to spend more on the people than on the army. I think someone said the other day about one of the drawbacks of the planned economy; that it took GOSPLAN weeks to figure out why there were shortages. why was that? because no-one had the balls to tell them. They didn't want to end up in a mental hospital.

in conclusion, the fall of the USSR was down to the totalitarian nature of its state. that contributed to economic hardships and turned the people against it. amongst other things that is.

(Edited by Just Joe at 7:15 pm on Mar. 31, 2003)

[Cassius Clay]

Revisionism. Khruschev revised the ideas of Marx and Lenin and declared that the Dictatorship of the Prolertariat no longer existed. The Soviet Union became 'A State of all people' including Capitalists.

Brezhneve tried his best but suffered from being to beuracratic, a set of circumstances not of his own making and a lack of that great benefit called hignsight.

Anyway ofcourse it's more complicated than that but this is a excellent conclusion.

''The main part was that the polituburo stopped listening to the people and did things that they did not agree with, and they voted to leave it. ''

Although it must be pointed out that even in 1991 the people voted for the Union to remain but Yelstin, Gorby and co ignored it and signed over the USSR to the U$.

[Anonymous]

it all started with the afghan war...

then, the hunger, wich was colossal and growing, forced the politburo to make the perestroika...
something i opose yes since it destroyed the conception of planned economy and the dictatorship of the proletariat...
yet it ws necessary to assure food and good for everyone...

and no pete the politburo didnt stoped listening to the people, in fact with gorbachov the politburo was even more close to the people, a proof of it was the glasnot policy that declared all crimes of the soviet union, and the red army...
plus the state had now to be clear about its policys to the people..
so it was more popular yes...

yet gorbachov made a far too big mistake and aproved the "free" votes...
in other words he was allowing the creation of a borgeuase state...

Gorbachev´s revisionism was not in vain...
the social and political part of his revisionism was Ok...
until the part he allowed the "free" elections ofcourse
needless to say taht i am in favor of the glasnot policy..

the perestroika was something politicaly and socially good at first...
and economly speaking it was good at a short range...
yet it should be used only until the food sockpiles were set normal and the consumer goods were enough....
and then state controled economy again...

Gorbachov did what he HAD to do...
he was in a hard position...
and Yelstin was always on his ass...


so it wasnt just one or two things that made the union colapse...
it was the conjugation of severall problems allied with the efforts of a capitalist moron that fooled the people with bread...
and now the people are paying for theyr betrayal...

FUCK YELSTIN!

[thursday night]

Cassius Clay is correct. He said it better than I could have. ;)

[redstar2000]

I think it's fair to say a convergence of developments resulted in the fall of the USSR...it was no "one thing".

Some things are obvious; the economic burden of trying to maintain sufficient military power to resist U.S. imperialism imposed constant heavy strains, shortages, etc. The professional military establishment in the USSR, like their counterparts everywhere, always wanted "more" and were always willing to scare the hell out of civilians to get it.

The central economic planning organs were plagued with late and misleading information. As JustJoe pointed out, you don't want to be the bringer of bad news if that could result in bad news for you personally.

Cassius is also right; Khrushchev embraced the "reforms" of a Soviet economist...the effects of which were to make each factory manager directly and personally responsible for the "profitability" of "his" factory. As you might imagine, the kind of mind-set that develops in these circumstances results in an attitude of "ownership" on the part of the factory manager...and then a strong desire to remove those quotation marks. The new capitalist ruling class in Russia originated in the Khrushchev era.

My personal "slant" on the end of the USSR has to do with the role of wide-spread corruption in the public sector...and the resultant public demoralization.

After the civil war, as far as I can tell, the Bolsheviks did not take the central Asian parts of the old Czarist empire very seriously, from a revolutionary standpoint. They created Soviet-style institutions and emancipated women from the restrictions of Islamic law...but left the clan structures of those societies intact.

In central Asia, then as now, corruption is not seen as "a bad thing" but rather the "normal" way of doing business. I suspect that even during the Stalin era, there was a sub-culture of corruption in the central Asian republics...and that it spread into the Ukraine and Russia proper after Stalin's death. The rot spread slowly at first...under Brezhnev, it exploded. The shelves at the "state stores" were empty; the black market had everything in abundance.

That people in Russia became hyper-cynical about communist rhetoric is understandable under the circumstances.

You will occasionally hear people blame Gorbachev for the end of the USSR, but I think that's historically unfair. Think of him as a general that takes over a defeated and demoralized army simply in order to negotiate the terms of surrender.

In the end, there were only a handful of people willing to fight for the USSR...and "Bloody Yeltsin" murdered them when he "dissolved" parliament.

Looking back on the whole experience, those Menshevik critics of Lenin who echoed Marx in saying that socialism in backward Russia was impossible were right.

And yet...who among us cannot but admire those who "stormed heaven itself"? Who among us would not have sat proudly in the Petrograd Soviet and voted enthusiastically for "the beginning of the socialist order"?

The Paris Commune lasted but 80 days. The USSR lasted over 70 years.

Third time's a charm?

:cool: