Blaming Gorbachev for the Collapse of the Soviet Union
On December 5 1991 the Soviet Union was declared officially
non-existent, radically changing the world’s economic and political
environment. On the 10 February 1991 Heydar Aliyev spoke in
Parliament warning of his anticipation that the Soviet Union was to
collapse, “The Culprit to be blamed is Gorbachev”.
There is no doubt Gorbachev played a prominent role in the fall of
communism in the USSR and the collapse of the USSR itself, as well as
acquiring the responsibility for ending the Cold War, a major post-war
tension. What I will endeavour to conclude in this essay is the
extent to which Gorbachev was responsible for the USSR’s downfall and
the other factors which became an affect.
Gorbachev was born into a peasant family on 2 March 1931. After
realising law was not to be his proffesion he joined the communist
party of the Soviet Union in 1952. He was later elected to ‘the
Central Committee of the Communist Party’ of the Soviet Union as a
Member in 1971. From 1978-1985 he served as Secretary of the Central
Committee with responsibility for agriculture. From 1985 to 1991
Mikhail Gorbachev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He
also served as Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1970-1990
and acted as Chairman for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet
of the Union in 1984-85. From 1985 to 1990 he was a Member in ‘the
Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR’, serving as its President
(1989-1990). He served as President of the USSR in 1990-1991.
One of the key reasons Gorbachev is highlighted as the scape goat for
the collapse of the USSR w...
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...e venture to disallow their independence.
Gorbachev believed, as he did with glasnost, democratisation would aid
the legitimisation of the Communist Party’s power.
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Anticipating the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Heydar Aliyev's Speech
February 10, 1991
The culprit to be blamed is Gorbachev, who seized the power of the
Central Committee of the Soviet Party along with all the power of the
government. During the past five years, Gorbachev has made so many
promises to the nation but has kept none of them. There is a void
between word and action, and a gap between political leadership and
the nation. This has resulted in skepticism and disbelief in the
government and the people's disappointment in the future has increased
to the extent that the influence of the Communist Party doesn't exist
any more.
He had a history of involvement with the labor movement and the Australian Labor Party. Spending much of his working life as a union official.
The Cold War was a post-World War II struggle between the United States. and its allies and the group of nations led by the Soviet Union. Direct military conflict did not occur between the two superpowers, but intense economic and diplomatic struggles erupted in the country. Different interests led to mutual suspicion and hostility in a rising philosophy. The United States played a major role in the ending of the Cold War.
Wallerstein, M. & Western, B. 2000. Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why? Annual Review of Political Science. 3: 355-377.
One of the most significant events in the twentieth century was the dissolution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) in 1991. The reason why this event was so significant was because it ended the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, the Cold War, and the reign of one of the greatest world powers at the time. There were many reasons for the collapse, and it has been postulated that the Perestroika reforms had the most significant effect. The reforms, implemented by Mikael Gorbachev, were meant to address the dire financial and economic situation the country was facing as a result of the incompetent Stalin regime. Though these reforms were created with the best intentions, unfortunately they failed, eventually leading to great dissatisfaction with Gorbachev’s leadership. The Communist Party was so displeased with the performance of their leader that they staged a coup d’état to remove him from power (History.com). Thus, by the end of 1991, the Perestroika reforms directly lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to the collapse of the economy, lack of infrastructure of modernization, and failure to move the communist party towards democracy. One of the largest goals of the reforms was to address the broken economy.
The end of the world. Though this seems like something that will not happen for a million years the world came close to it during the early twentieth century because of the cold war. The two most powerful nations of the time were locked in an arms race/cold war. If one of the leaders of the United States and its allies, or one of the leaders of the Soviet Union and its allies had made one wrong move, it could have caused the end of the human race. To deal with this scary time both leaders had to take action to keep their people safe, while maintaining peace. But to a leader of a country something more important than peace is the safety of the country. Khrushchev had to take actions to keep his country safe. Khrushchev did not succeed in strengthening national security because of one huge mistake he made with Cuba.
The paper will discuss minicases on ‘The White-Collar Union Organizer’ and ‘The Frustrated Labor Historians’ by Arthur A. Sloane and Fred Witney (2010), to understand the issues unions undergo in the marketplace. There is no predetermined statistical number reported of union memberships in this country. However, “the United Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) excludes almost 2 million U.S wages and salary employees, over half of whom are employed in the public sector, who are represented at their workplaces by a union but are not union members. Not being required to join a union as a condition of continued employment, these employees have for a variety of reasons chosen not to do so. Nor do the BLS estimates include union members who are currently unemployed” (Sloane & Witney, 2010, p.5). Given this important information, the examination of these minicases will provide answers to the problems unions face in organizational settings.
The overall collapse of the Communist regime came rather quickly, but there were underlying causes of the collapse that were apparent during the preceding decades. On the surface, the 1970s looked good for the Soviet Union. A lot of certain aspects were still going the Soviet Unions way. However, in 1975, the Soviet Union’s power peaked. In 1975, the Soviet Union’s power began to dwindle and there were six underlying causes of the collapse that can be dated back to that year. In this essay I will discuss these six causes and how they helped bring about the actual collapse of the Soviet regime.
Communism is defined as a political and economical doctrine, the aim which is to abolish private ownership of property and for-profit enterprise and to replace these with public ownership and control of industry, agriculture, and resources (“Communism”). The product of this government is supposed to be a society free of class ranking based on wealth, property, and political power. The Soviet Union was the first country to test these governmental strategies and it did not take long for the regime to collapse. The inevitable collapse of communism led to the fall of the Berlin Wall; this started the domino effect of freedom that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On June 22, 1941, the Adolf Hitler launched a ruthless attack on his so-called ally, the Soviet Union. In December 1941, after a short five months, Operation Barbarossa, induced by the Nazi’s, failed. The Nazi Party ultimately fell to its demise, through the fail of Operation Barbarossa, from a combination of Hitler’s arrogance towards the Soviets as well as the Soviet response, but most importantly, Hitler’s greatest mistake: spreading his troops too wide across a colossal Russia.
Though both leaders were determined to end the cold war it became amazing that it intensified instead of reducing. It became clear that Khrushchev really meant “peaceful competition “instead of “peaceful coexistence” when he started visiting countries like Burma and Afghanistan to give them economic aid if they agreed to support Russia. As a result of the western allied powers forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Khrushchev responded to this by forming a military alliance of communist countries named the Warsaw pact. Members of the Warsaw pact included Albania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, East Germany and the Soviet Union.
Before one can understand the fall of the Soviet Union, he has to know how the nation came into being and the leaders, and the location of the country and the time period of its reign. How did the Soviet Union come into existence? Through the 1900’s the Soviet Union was entangled in a vast number of conflicts all because they wanted to spread communism. Subsequently, the rampant spread of communism and Soviet ideals had an impact in the First World War, Second World and Cold War. Under the authoritarian control of Russian leaders the budget for the military and various sectors clarifies that the Soviet Union in its existence failed.
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signified, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold but not clothed." There was never a war that this idea can be more correct applied to than the Cold War. According to noted author and Cold War historian Walter Lippman, the Cold War can be defined as a state of tension between states, which behave with great distrust and hostility towards each other, but do not resort to violence. The Cold War encompasses a period from the end of the Second World War (WWII), in 1945, to the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1989. It also encompassed the Korean and Vietnam Wars and other armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, that, essentially, were not wars for people but instead for territories and ideologies. "Nevertheless, like its predecessors, the Cold War has been a worldwide power contest in which one expanding power has threatened to make itself predominant, and in which other powers have banded together in a defensive coalition to frustrate it---as was the case before 1815, as was the case in 1914-1918 as was the case from 1939-1945" (Halle 9). From this power contest, the Cold War erupted.
to assume the role of dictator. This was a phenomenon which was to become a
The Soviet Union, which was once a world superpower in the 19th century saw itself in chaos going into the 20th century. These chaoses were marked by the new ideas brought in by the new leaders who had emerged eventually into power. Almost every aspect of the Soviet Union was crumbling at this period both politically and socially, as well as the economy. There were underlying reasons for the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eventually Eastern Europe. The economy is the most significant aspect of every government. The soviet economy was highly centralized with a “command economy” (p.1. fsmitha.com), which had been broken down due to its complexity and centrally controlled with corruption involved in it. A strong government needs a strong economy to maintain its power and influence, but in this case the economic planning of the Soviet Union was just not working, which had an influence in other communist nations in Eastern Europe as they declined to collapse.