The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was a global superpower, possessing the largest armed forces on the planet with military bases from Angola in Africa, to Vietnam in South-East Asia, to Cuba in the Americas. When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, nobody expected than in less than seven years the USSR would disintergrate into fifteen separate states.

Gorbachev's attempt at democratising the totalitarian Soviet system backfired on him as the Soviet republics began to revolt against Moscow's control. This was not a case of economic and political crisis producing liberalisation and democratisation. Rather, it was liberalisation and democratisation that brought the regime to crisis point.

After coming to power, Gorbachev implemented domestic economic reforms that he hoped would improve living standards and worker productivity as part of his perestroika (reconstruction) program. The Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1987, was perhaps the most radical of the economic reforms during the early part of the Gorbachev era. For the first time since Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy, the law permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign-trade sectors. The law initially imposed high taxes and employment restrictions, but it later revised these to avoid discouraging private-sector activity. Under this provision, cooperative restaurants, shops, and manufacturers became part of the Soviet scene.

Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost (openness) gave new freedoms to the people, such as a greater freedom of speech; a radical change as control of speech and suppres...

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...journalist asked the president if he still thought it was the evil empire. "No," he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era."

Gorbachev could have well perpetuated the old totalitarian system. He still had the giant Soviet armies, the daunting nuclear might and the chilling KGB apparatus at his disposal. However, he instead chose the difficult path of reform both abroad and domestically.

The Soviet Union, an ethnically diverse nation, was soon ripped apart by separatist movements as Moscow's central authority weakened. The power struggle between Gorbachev and Russian nationalist Boris Yeltsin proved to be the nail in the coffin for the USSR. On 25 December 1991, the Soviet red flag was lowered from the Kremlin and by the end of the month the USSR had passed into history. Fifteen new states stood where one mighty superpower had recently held sway.