History of the Collapse of the Soviet Union

account statement of the Collapse of the Soviet due northHow can one explain the disintegration and eventual relegate of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence?The disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union was the result of a intricate crew of internal and external instancys which had been building for decades. Economic decline, strong currents of indigenous nationalism, turpitude and the governanceatic deligitimization of the primeval authority and Communist ideology all contributed to an environment of internal pressure, doubt and cynicism. Externally, the Soviet Unions foreign policy had led it into a disco biscuitse and costly confrontation with the western, both socially and militarily. The combination of these internal and external pressures forced the Soviet Union into an untenable position, no longsighteder able to adjudge control through a sense of legitimacy and lacking the will to exact it through force. numerous were surprised not only at the spe ed with which the USSR unraveled, but also at how quickly jingoistic movements and organizations were able to move forward with popular support and structure in such a wretched amount of clipping. The pressures that had been building show the collapse of the Soviet Union to gain been to a greater extent akin to a dam breaking, releasing pent up pressure and momentum that had been merely held mainstay. What made the disintegration and collapse of the Soviet Union so remarkable was not just the convergence of so many interlinking factors to necessitate its failure, but the means and manner in which its broken parts responded.It must be remembered that the Soviet Union was an empire. As Gerhard Simon Points out in Aussenpolitik, it was the first of its kind, held together by a troupe and a committment to ideology. As a result The Soviet Union was not perceived in the context of the early(a) empires which had fallen apart in Europe The USSR, on the other hand, ranked in the West as a normal state The Soviet Union, however, was simply not a normal state. (Simon, 2000) It was based upon the legitimacy of its party and its ideology. The trunkatic constipation of this legitimacy served as one of the main factors in its disintegration and collapse. It was the modify of the dam itself, so to speak. The actions of its satellite states represent the impulses of newly quitd captives, not the heartless abandonment of their mother-state.The pressures against the dam, however, reach back into the early 20th century. Simon identifies the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 as an effective reassertion of the Russian empire pursuance the First World War. Furthermore, he argues that it arrested the nationalic movements taking shape among the recently freed peoples of post-imperial Russia. These nationalist movements, of major pagan and cultural signficance for many, were not stamped out under the Soviet system of control and oppression. They were merely pushed subway syst em. They worn out(p) the rectify part of the 20th century building momentum from indoors the Soviet system until the internal pressures, exerted in so many directions and ports, could no longer be contained. (Simon, 2000) This explains how quickly and eagerly the different sattelite states declared emancipation and moved toward Western models of government and economy. The causes for the downfall are rooted, on the one hand, in the design errors of the Soviet system and, on the other hand, in the process of degeneration which had been undermining stability for decades. (Simin, 2000)The currents of nationalism within the Soviet Union were intensified and gained strength as Stalins controls were gradually loosened and the legitimacy of the Communist fellowship began to suffer in public view as instruction began to flow more freely. Nationalist aspect coincided with social events in the 50s and 60s where labororers from the Soviet Gulag returned home and began to speech with l ong-lost friends and relatives to the highest degree what had happened to them. (Hosking, 1991) This began to affect public perceptions and attitudes for the first time. People of like mind began meeting privately in their homes to talk and listen to Western radio. Eventually, the dissemination of unofficial literature, known as Samizdat, began. A culture of covert associations and unfathomable groups emerged. They began to grow covertly in response to the systematic persecution of intellectuals and dissidents. These groups and associations eventually began operating openly in the ripe 80s, only to add to the tremendously diverse pressures pulling at the Soviet Union. (Hosking, 1991)As nationalist sentiments began to gain strength from such a social awakening, they quickly learned that their energies were best spent organizing within the Soviet system. Different national movements had gained strength and led to uprisings in Hungaria in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Sov iets put them down quickly and brutally. (Fowkes, 1993) The party leadership had no qualms most forcibly helping their ideological pre labor unionptions become reality (Simon, 2000)Combined with the social awakening, and the currents of nationalism running through the USSR, was the systematic deligitimisation of its sytem. During the 1950s the Soviet middle class became increasingly optimistic about the performance of the Soviet system and about its own prospects for material betterment In the 1970s it has given way to pessimism. The rise and decline of middle-class optimism can be linked in part to semi semipolitical developments, but the crucial determinant has been the changing perception of Soviet sparing performance. (Dallin Laepidus, 1995) Ruled by ideology, the failure to meet economic goals and expectations constituted a signigicant crisis of confidence for many and a serious blow to the legitimacy of collectivist economic philoophy.The political developments that con tributed to the deterioration of Soviet legitimacy had to do with a dissonance between ideology and practice. The conflicts of Krushchevs de-Stalinisation gave way to political rifts which exposed key divisions in government. This dis-unity was damaging to public confidence and to Soviet political legitimacy. It became a habit for the new Soviet leader to deal with his problems by casting blame and criticism upon his predecessor. solely successors have dissociated themselves along similar lines from their respective predecessors, declared them to be unpersons, and thus contributed considerably to the delegitimation of the Soviet system. (Simon, 2000) The geological formation of this practice had an extremely detrimental effect upon the public perception, resulting in a more entrenched cynicism toward governance in general and political leadership.Furthermore, this cynicism became even more stockyly rooted in the social and political culture as Brezhnevs Soviet Union saying the spread of corruption invade almost every corner of Soviet life. The Soviet Union is infected from top to bottom with corruption from the thespian who gives the storeman a bottle of vodka to get the best job, to the politburo candidate Mzhavanadze who takes hundreds of thousands of rubles for protecting underground millionaires from the street prostitute, who pays the policeman ten rubles so that he wont prevent her from soliciting clients, to the former member of the Politburo Ekaterina Furtseva, who built a fantastic suburban villa at the governments expense each and everyone is afflicted with corruption. (Dallin Laepidus, 1995)The lack of legitimacy by itself was not enough to dissolve the Soviet Union, as no single issue probably could have been, but it was enough to make everyone look to themselves. Public cynicism feature with deep graft and corruption at all levels made for a political system held together simply by control. Within this system the communal ideal was effe ctively dead. Everyone looked to cut corners, everyone looked for a bigger piece of a zero-sum pie. The Soviet Union saw the development of competing interests within itself rooted in a system of corruption. Combined with the currents of nationalism, who were cut nobble in their bid for self-determination, and the social underground harboring forbidden ideas and conversations and publications, this in-fighting proved to be the final element of a political picture which had lost its fundamental integrity.From a foreign policy shoot down of view, this is also when the Soviet Union came to be known as the Evil Empire. With the gradual relaxation of Stalins controls came an increase flow of uncontrolled information between the Soviet Union and the West. The turning of international sentiment against the Soviet Union in the late 70s and early 80s, as the truths of their social and political system made their way into the international mainstream, only served to heighten the moral legit imacy of the West in confronting Soviet Ambitions abroad. Before that, the American political spectrum remained solidly divided over how best to engage the USSR. later on the moral clarity issued by the facts of such an indictment, the West was far less sympathetic and much more aggressive in applying all the external pressure it could. The socialist/communist intelligentsia in the West lost credibility and standing, while the political mainstream in both America and Europe both saw thwarting Soviet ambitions as a strategic, and more importantly, a moral imperative.With a moral legislation to challenge Soviet interests across the globe, the Americans committed fully to maintaining their military and technological advantage, and dealt with little opposition from within their own political system. At the height of the arms race, it is estimated that the Soviet Union allocated anywhere from at least 15 percent (Dallin Laepidus, 1995) to 25 percent (Simon, 2000) of their budget to de fense spending. This represented huge external pressure to an already struggling Soviet economy beign outperformed by its Western counterparts.The economic difficulties of the Soviet system were dissemble initially as steady growth in the 1950s led to a sense of optimism. From that point onward, Soviet growth move to decline. One reason was that earlier on, inputs-capital, labor, energy-had been ample and cheap. By the 1970s this was no longer so (Dallin Laepidus, 1995) Furthermore, Dallin and Laepidus note that productivity was low, and the system failed to provide adequate incentives for harder work of for technological innovation. So in addition to the economic circumstances of declining growth, the Soviet system had no way of increasing the productivity of its workers or the creativity of its technology industry. Above all, the motivating effect of the market, competition and profit could not be replaced by any system of allocation and control, regardless of how sophisticate d it may have been. Initiative, creativity and the pains for profit maximisation drifted into the shadow economy and corruption afterward the disciplining and deterrent effects of Stalinist bratwurst had ceased to be effective. (Simon, 2000) And so while the economy declined, the quality of goods and services continued to decline as well. (Notice the manifest absence of hsitorical market demand for Soviet goods) The Soviet system had killed off or driven aside the very tools it needed to recover. Or from the point of view of Hillel Ticktin, who famously predicted the failure of perestroika and accurately described the long denied economic realities of the then-current Soviet system, they had put themselves in a position (according to Communist ideology) where they needed to defeat the operative class and return them to the conditions under which they had been exploited before. (Ticktin, 1992) It is a cruel irony, indeed, that the very pronouncements of the ideology that sustai ned their political order walked hand in hand with their economic doom.In the late 80s the sum of all the factors discussed here proved too great. The nationalist movements the Bolshevik revolution had arrested in mid-development were driven underground but ultimately endured within the Soviet system, waiting to release a momentum held back by years of Soviet control. These sentiments found friendly ears in the social underground that developed as information began to flow more freely after the gradual relaxation of Stalins controls. This underground only continued to grow as the oppressed and free-thinking individuals of the Soviet Union continually sought refuge in association with one another. These two elements only reinforced the sense of lost legitimacy following the economic setbacks of the mid-20th century and the political divisions that showed the first cracks in the Soviet political system. The the general sense of a passage of legitimacy was a critical blow that aided t he widespread proliferation of a deep and contagious corruption which came to partially define and become engrained in the culture.This corruption struck at the heart of all the mechanisms the Soviet Union needed to right itself, but it was at the same time a consequence of the system itself. They had, in the course of their committment to their ideology, abandoned the necesssary tools to successfully recover and advance their economy. The social forces of discontent, the nationalist sentiments and social underground, have with economic factors to present significant internal difficulties. And as Soviet foreign policy demanded a deal out of defense spending four times larger than that of the United States (as a percentage of GNP), external pressures combined with internal pressures to literally put the Soviet system in a pressure cooker.By the time Gorbechevs came through with perestroika, the myriad social and political interests at odds with one another, combined with the deep c ynicism and scorn for the Soviet system rooted in the social underground, proved too much. There was no social consensus or any real momentum for support. The political and social contiguity of the Soviet political system had been broken long ago. For the first time since the revolution of 1917, society, rather than the state, was driving the process of budge in Soviet life. But that society was increasingly fragmented, fractious, and polarized, pitting radical democrats against die-hard communists and nationalists of all kinds against Soviet patriots. In this setting Gorbachev found himself reacting to multiple and conflicting pressures in an effort, growing ever more desperate, to get hold of the country together. (Strayer, 1998)The final years of the Soviet system were spent with the political leadership desperately try to hold it together. But it could never survive the collapse of its political order because it was under the very feigning of that political order that the So viet Union came to power. The Communist party had reconstituted the empire and developed the instruments of rule, which meant that, following the partys loss of power, there was no other force to hold the empire together. (Simin, 2000) Meanwhile, the political alternatives that had been exploitation and taking shape within the Soviet system itself, the national movements which never came to fruition, provided the impetus to break free from the Soviet system. As new declarations of independence were proclaimed, one after the other, the consequence of decades of pent-up energy (Simon, 2000) ensured that the strugle for nationhood which began after the fall of the first Russian Empire, would continue after the second.BibliographyDallin, A., (1992) Causes of the Collapse of the USSR, Post-Soviet Affairs. Vol. 8, No. 4Dallin, A., Lapidus, G., (1994), The Soviet system of rules From Crisis to Collapse Westview PressCambridge, MAGlenny, M., (1990) The Rebirth of History PenguinLondonFowk es, B., (1993) The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. MacMillan ChicagoHosking, G., (1991) The Awakening of the Soviet Union. Harvard University Press Cambridge, MAHosking, G., Et Al., (1992) The Road to Post Communism item-by-item political movements in the USSR, 1985-91, London/New YorkKotz,D., Weir, F., (1997) Revolution from Above. The Demise of the Soviet System. RoutledgeNew YorkMiliband, R., Panitch, L., (1991) Communist Regimes. The viewing Socialist RegisterSimon, G., (2000) The End of the Soviet Union Causes and Relational Contexts Aussenpolitik German Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 47, No.1Strayer,R., (1998) wherefore did the Soviet Union Collapse? M.E Sharpe Armonk, NYTicktin, H., (1992) Origins of the Crisis in the USSR. M.E. Sharpe Ltd.New York