I surprisingly don’t know as much of the dissolution of the USSR as I would hope. I know that 70%+ of every polled nation wanted a reformed Soviet Union not dissolution, but why did it get to that point. Did things slowly decline since Khrushchev, since Brezhnev, or later? What led to the liberalization of their statesmen? Like, Gorbachev and Yeltsin (I think?) were involved in government, how did this happen? Were Glasnost and Perestroika the killing blow after a long time coming or were they the first of their kind? Do most communists dislike both of these policies or were they decent ideas that were fucked up in implementation? Thanks in advance I don’t know enough about the details of the USSR’s fall
This requires more than a post to cover the entire history of the USSR, but in summary, it all kind of started with Khrushchev. Khrushchev was undoubtedly a revisionist, and his policies like the Kosygin reforms, the replacement of the label DotP with “State of the Whole People” and laughable claims like “Communism in 100 years” set the USSR down the path towards the capitalist mode of production. The bureaucracy that formed within the USSR had lead to the USSR being disconnected with the masses, basically trying things out to see if it would improve the USSR in any way. It did not. If anything, it lead to further liberalisation. There was no “absenteeism” that was common called by anti-communists, but rather, the USSR had begun to quantitatively change in regards to the mode of production.
It just accumulated. and as dialectics go, the quantitative transforms to qualitative. Which is why Gorbachev rose to power to begin with. His reforms like Glasnost and Perestroika were despised by the masses, in fact Gorbachev was not a very popular leader especially since he considered bans on things like vodka. But since the masses couldn’t oust him, it was clear that the DotP had shattered, and what remained was a bureaucratic government that was ready to burst.
This is oversimplistic, and I believe I’m missing out a lot of things, which is why you should do further investigation on this topic.
tl;dr: Bureaucracy and Revisionism is why the USSR collapsed, also do research.
Interesting I never knew Glasnost and Perestroika were unpopular. Thanks for the info. Also no lie, as someone from a Slavic family, I have to say that was the one decent policy decision of Gorbachev, the vodka thing. I mean I don’t wanna sound depressing or anything but seriously alcoholism is really not taken very seriously by some people (ahem half my family) because they think being Slavic means they have a liver crafted from Tungsten. And that affects families and life expectancies. Someone needed to do something about the nation’s alcohol problem, but maybe Gorbachev handled it poorly.