The Soviet Union and the Legacy of Communist Rule

The Soviet Union and the Legacy of Communist Rule

The December of 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union—and with it, an entire era. Like the February Revolution of 1917 that ended tsardom, the events leading up to August 1991 took place in rapid succession, with both spontaneity and, to some degree, retrospective inevitability. To understand the demise of Soviet Union is to understand the communist party-state system itself. Although the particular happenings of the Gorbachev years undoubtedly accelerated its ruin, there existed fundamental flaws within the Soviet system that would be had been proven ultimately fatal. The USSR became a past chapter of history because it was impossible to significantly reform the administrative command system without destroying its very core, and because Gorbachev's "democratic socialism" was unattainable without abandoning the very notion of Soviet socialism itself. As R. Strayer had pointed out in Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse?, the USSR was held together under Communist rule with "a mixture of ideological illusion and raw coercion" (Strayer, 36). The Gorbachev era saw both of these two bases of the party-state's power falling apart.

By the mid-1980s, urbanization and higher education had transformed the Soviet society from a relatively homogenous one into one that was considerably diverse with a sizable middle-class. Educated and exposed to Western culture, the professionals and the white collars were far more likely to understand the Soviet Union's weaknesses and the system's fallacies than their counterparts decades ago. Coupled with the intelligentsia's anti-establishment tradition (as embodied by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakhorav), this new class of economic elite had ...

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... an enormous void in Russian society. The old party-state machine was demolished, yet no new concrete political system had risen in its place. The old ideology was discredited, yet no newfound conviction could unite the country. After the 1991 coup, even Gorbachev was powerless to steer his Mother Russia. To this day, the old legacy of Communist rule haunts the nation still.

Works Cited

Aslund, Anders. How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. 1995

Brown, Archie. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996.

John L. H. Keep. Last of the Empires. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995.

Strayer, Robert. Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? New York: M.E. Sharpe. 1998.

Tucker, Robert C. "Lenin and Revolution". The Lenin Anthology. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1994.