Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?

  1. Ilyich
    Ilyich
    This question has been on my mind for a long time. I still don't have a fully formed opinion but I was hoping to form one that doesn't follow the bourgeois (the Soviet Union was an evil empire that collapsed because the people rose up and destroyed communism) or anti-revisionist Stalinist (the Soviet Union was socialist under Stalin and wouldn't have collapse if it weren't for revisionists like Khrushchev and Gorbachev) explanations.

    My understanding is that the Soviet Union was a deformed workers' state, a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. In order to overthrow this bureaucracy and establish a workers' state under the control of the proletariat, a political revolution composed of and led by proletarians was needed.

    It is also my understanding the the ruling bureaucracy of the Soviet deformed workers' state was not a class but a caste. It had political power but did not own the means of production. Because a class is inherently more powerful than a caste, the bureaucracy would like to restore capitalism and use its political power to gain ownership of the means of production and become the new bourgeoisie.

    When the workers decide they have had enough of Stalinism, they begin to form a political revolution. The bureaucracy than co-opts that political revolution and leads the restoration of capitalism.

    Is this correct?
  2. Brosa Luxemburg
    Brosa Luxemburg
    Well, this guy is kinda a M-L sympathizer, but I think his thesis in the book (that it didn't collapse, but was overthrown) is correct and doesn't take the whole "revisionists did it" or "evils of communism" approach. http://www.amazon.com/Blackshirts-Re.../dp/0872863298

    There are some obvious disagreements in the book, but overall it is interesting and very right on certain key issues.
  3. Geiseric
    Geiseric
    Well the bureaucracy wanted to restore capitalism, and exploit the workers more. Working conditions and overall society in the U.S.S.R. was better for the working class than most "advanced capitalist" countries, and the bureaucracy couldn't take that away, until they finished the counter revolution.
  4. A Marxist Historian
    A Marxist Historian
    This question has been on my mind for a long time. I still don't have a fully formed opinion but I was hoping to form one that doesn't follow the bourgeois (the Soviet Union was an evil empire that collapsed because the people rose up and destroyed communism) or anti-revisionist Stalinist (the Soviet Union was socialist under Stalin and wouldn't have collapse if it weren't for revisionists like Khrushchev and Gorbachev) explanations.

    My understanding is that the Soviet Union was a deformed workers' state, a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. In order to overthrow this bureaucracy and establish a workers' state under the control of the proletariat, a political revolution composed of and led by proletarians was needed.

    It is also my understanding the the ruling bureaucracy of the Soviet deformed workers' state was not a class but a caste. It had political power but did not own the means of production. Because a class is inherently more powerful than a caste, the bureaucracy would like to restore capitalism and use its political power to gain ownership of the means of production and become the new bourgeoisie.

    When the workers decide they have had enough of Stalinism, they begin to form a political revolution. The bureaucracy than co-opts that political revolution and leads the restoration of capitalism.

    Is this correct?
    No, not really. Trotsky described the Stalinist system as a ball balanced on a pyramid, or something like that. The amazing thing is not that it collapsed, but how long it took. The reason being that the Soviet victory in WWII over Hitler stabilized the system and gave Stalin and Stalinism thoroughly undeserved credit with the working class of the world in general and the USSR in particular, for a very long time.

    Quite simply, the Soviet system ran out of gas and collapsed. The decisive factor is when the regime finally lost all credibility with the working class. As it was a workers state, however deformed, it could not survive without support or at least passive acceptance by the working class. Unlike a bourgeois regime. It finally lost that under Gorbachev.

    There was working class insurgency, most notably of the coal miners in 1989, who briefly swept the bureaucrats aside and formed workers councils, soviets, to run a lot of coal towns. But, lacking a revolutionary leadership, that fizzled out.

    What this meant however was a statement to the whole country that the coal miners, the heart of the Soviet working class, no longer considered the USSR their own workers state. So the state collapsed. It wasn't overthrown by anyone, it just popped like a balloon.

    And, given the passivity and demoralization of the working class after more than half a century of Stalinism, the brand new bourgeoisie that rose out of the ashes, partly from the bureaucracy and partly from Mafia and criminal elements, filled the void.

    -M.H.-
  5. HumanRightsGuy
    HumanRightsGuy
    Ilyich:

    You seem already to have a pretty good idea as to why the Soviet Union collapsed, and A Marxist Historian seems to possess a somewhat clearer understanding of that fact.

    My favorite explanation is that provided by Trotsky himself, who, having been assassinated in the year 1940, didn't see the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet explained that collapse, nevertheless.

    As here presented in a piece by Barry Sheppard, entitled: "In Reply to Peter Boyle, by Barry Sheppard" (I'm too new on this forum to be able to link, so, to check out my cite, just look up "In Reply to Peter Boyle, by Barry Sheppard":

    "What had happened was what Trotsky predicted would happen if the workers failed to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracies: “The political prognosis [for the USSR] has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”"

    'Nuff said.

    Save for the following:

    After Stalin's death, the ultimate leadership of the Soviet Union fell for a brief time upon Georgy Malenkov, a native born Russian of Macedonian extraction, and the Russian Nikolai Bulganin, but thereafter remained, following a massive power struggle, in the hands of members of the Ukrainian party (Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) who were of sufficient age to have, possibly, been guilty of massive crimes in the Ukraine during the early 1930's. I don't know if you recall the period during which the Soviet leadership was referred to in the press as a "Gerontocracy", and seemed to have been dying off as soon as they assumed power, but the whole weird scenario appears to me to suggest the possibility of the Soviet Union having functioned throughout this period as a "Zombie State" in order to protect those guilty of the Ukrainian Terror Famine, only to collapse as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev, himself a Ukrainian, yet too young to have been guilty of Stalin's crimes in that Republic, took the reigns.

    Hmmmm.
  6. Fourth Internationalist
    [Stalinism's] attempt to suppress capitalist economic laws through proletarian property forms and crude planning created a strikingly inefficient and unstable form of capitalism. Stalinism's initial totalitarian repression was battered by proletarian upheavals, forcing it to make concessions to the workers and accelerating its economic decline. In order to survive and better exploit the proletariat, it has had to subordinate itself openly to Western imperialism and the discipline of the world market

    (from the LRP http://lrp-cofi.org/book/BookReview.html)
  7. HumanRightsGuy
    HumanRightsGuy
    [Stalinism's] attempt to suppress capitalist economic laws through proletarian property forms and crude planning created a strikingly inefficient and unstable form of capitalism. Stalinism's initial totalitarian repression was battered by proletarian upheavals, forcing it to make concessions to the workers and accelerating its economic decline. In order to survive and better exploit the proletariat, it has had to subordinate itself openly to Western imperialism and the discipline of the world market

    (from the LRP http://lrp-cofi.org/book/BookReview.html)
    Well, I'm not so sure of your State Capitalist analysis, yet I largely agree with you.