The Fall of the Soviet Union
(and the Birth of the CIS)
by Greg McCulley
drafted 17 May 99
Note: This essay references the book The New Russians by Hedrick Smith. All citations below refer to this work.
1. To many, the fall of the Soviet Union came as a shock to the senses. As the Cold War adversary, Russia was thought by many Westerners to a perpetual "bad guy".. Several agencies, think tanks, and individuals in the West made a living watching the actions of the Soviet government and then interpreting those actions for the rest of the world. The information that these groups had to go on was meager at best. The USSR being a closed society, most of the details of political activity were not revealed in any way other than by observation of their consequences. So, when the Iron Curtain began to rust and fall away, it took most of us by surprise.The sheer brevity of the event (6 months from start to finish in Europe) was in itself remarkable.
2. But the fall of the Soviet Union was lengthy in the making. The impetuses behind the fall are many, and this essay seeks to discuss them in detail. The political, economic, social, and nationalist forces at work behind the country will be evaluated and placed in context with their times. As we shall see, there was much to see "behind the curtain".
Political
3. The political reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union began with Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. By denouncing Stalin in this speech, he began the unraveling of the state-controlled empire that Stalin had created. This act sparked turmoil in Soviet satellite states where Stalinism was not as deeply seated, and nations such as Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and others began to break away from the Soviets in varying degrees.
4. Often called "the thaw", Khrushchev's era brought, a comparatively liberal era to the Russian people. In his book, The New Russians, Hedrick Smith tells of how the political thaw excited many members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and in the period from 1953 to 1964, these people were given greater level of freedom than they ever had enjoyed. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who followed Khrushchev, reversed this way of thinking. There was a "retrogression" according to Smith (p. 21). So, what you have here is a generation that lived under the heavy-handed rule of Stalin and his oppression of free thought and savage purges. Then, this generation is liberated and is allowed to think for themselves and express at least a modicum of self-determination politically, only to have this revoked by Brezhnev. The years under Brezhnev were long, but the generation I described above had been allowed to think for a little while. Gorbachev was a member of this generation, and it is no accident that under him, the biggest changes swept the nation.
5. The oscillation between liberal policies (Khrushchev) and hard-liner policies (Brezhnev) created a generation that hungered for reform. Much of Smith's book deals with the rise of Gorbachev and the shaping of his reformist ideas. The ideas of glasnost and perestroika were Gorbachev's means of arousing the nation to action. Glasnost means openness in Russian, and that was what the country needed. It was not a free society, but it was a freer society. And if Khrushchev started the dismantling of Stalin's legacy, Gorbachev finished it. An era of anti-Stalinism ensued, and newspapers were soon running stories of his atrocities.
6. When considering the political reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, the above mentioned chain of events must be considered. The Communist Party leaders of the mid 1980s were reared in a society that taught the virtues of Stalin, "the friend of all workers". These often-geriatric leaders had to make an ideological 180-degree turn with the reformist era of Gorbachev. Perestroika means reform, or restructuring, and that is exactly what happened in Russia; there was a restructuring of political thought. Not everyone agreed with this in Russia. There were public debates, such as the one described by Smith where Gorbachev opened the 19th All-Union Communist Party conference to debate (p. 116). This was unprecedented in the USSR, and it was a lot for some leaders to take. Many of the "Old Guard" did not appreciate seeing Stalin's memory publicly dismantled. Although these were small pockets of left over hard-liners, they created a counterpoint to perestroika. This turmoil and drastic change in the political environment was a contributing factor in the fall of the Soviet Union.
Economic
7. Communism failed partly because the command economy just did not work. For an economy to flourish (and therefore, for the nation that presides over that economy to flourish), there must exist a market-driven economy. This means the market (meaning the people) decides what will be manufactured and bought and sold. This was not done in the Soviet Union for many years. The harsh dictatorial methods put in place by Stalin controlled the economy with an iron fist. Five-year plans were drawn up by the central government, and for the good of the people, these plans were adhered to. This was purported to bring prosperity to the nation, but it did not work out that way.
8. As flaws in the highly structured and inflexible command economy became apparent, the Soviet people began to tire of the food shortages and lack of consumer goods that were of sufficient quality. While Soviet production was kept high, the quality was horribly poor. The Soviet consumers paid the price for this, and since these people had no voice in government or society for the preponderance of Russia's history, the problems were perpetuated. Professor Bruce Hull's lectures (Univ of Maryland) provide many examples of this point. Everything from sour jam to nonfunctioning televisions was the product of the command economy that demanded production supervisors to meet quotas or else be arrested. Faced with this challenge, most factory directors sacrificed quality to "crash" work schedules and meet planning agencies' quotas. As Smith puts it, output is the sole determinant of success in Russia, not quality or selection (p. 196). It did not matter that the products of the economy were impractical (and even impracticable) for the consumer. What mattered was that they were produced, that the quota was met, and that the system appeared to be working. The facade was supported and reinforced.
9. The economic difficulties were exacerbated by the arms race that Khrushchev was running with the United States. The US drove the Soviet economy into the ground in the process of to winning this arms race. Our economic victory in the Cold War cost the Soviets their fiscal potency; to use the old analogy of guns and butter, the Soviets tried to have both guns and butter. There were not enough resources to cover this. By the late 1980's, most Soviets knew how the rest of the world was living and could see the obvious disparity in standards of living. People wanted to own property to be prosperous. The world was leaving Russia behind in terms of industry and technology. As Smith puts it, things for the Russians were bleak (p. 177).
10. The economic changes Gorbachev sought were ill defined when he took power. Perestroika was not a structured plan with milestones, but rather a mission statement for his policy. As he developed his own definition of perestroika in the 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev rocked the boat even more than he had by opening up the political environs. Up and down the Party and government structure, he met resistance from leaders who feared such sweeping changes would upset their power bases. When Gorbachev created the State Committee for Agroindustry that consumed five ministries, thousands of jobs were cut out of the bureaucracy (p. 212).
11. In addition to resistance to economic reform from leaders, there was friction from below in the population. Years earlier, Gorbachev had characterized this problem as the human factor. This problem of motivating workers to produce has been endemic in Russia for decades. Even with the reforms, though, the old system was still being used. Quotas were still coming from above, and there was no real change from the perspective of the worker. The new policies of openness and reform did not eliminate the lingering inefficiencies of Soviet workers.
Social and Nationalist
12. Workers make up the Soviet population. This includes workers in cities and workers on farms. Under Stalin's rule, both these groups of people were nothing more than tools of production. In America, for example, you see farmers, blacksmiths, metalworkers, and the like. But in the centralized Soviet system, workers were obedient, mindless cogs in a system that did not expect them to possess initiative or their own ideas (p. 186). Farmers could have been more accurately described as agricultural laborers. For decades, the workers in Russia were told what do to, how to do it, and when to do it. So, Stalin bred into the people this apathetic laziness that plagued the work force for decades. Smith quotes Nikolai Shmelyov who puts is succinctly:
Apathy, indifference, pilfering, and a lack of respect for honest work have become rampant, as had aggressive envy of those who earn a lot, even if they earn it honestly;(there are signs) of increased drunkenness and sloth.
13. This type of work force was not well suited to bring Russia out of her slumping economy. An animosity between workers and government was prevalent. From the worker's perspective, they were underpaid, and from the government's perspective, the workers were lazy. To recoup themselves for the wages they felt they should have earned, employee theft was rampant and other types of corruption flourished. This was the clay Gorbachev had to work with to remold a modern state.
14. Beyond difficulties in motivating the work force, there were other problems. Even though Soviets were enjoying unpredicted levels of freedoms, things were still not prosperous. Russians did not universally accept the reforms Gorbachev started (meaning the political shake-ups, economic reforms, and industrial plans). This is referred to above with the resistance many leaders had to perestroika. Social resistance was born out of the factionalism that existed in government. Some groups wanted reform, some wanted no reform, but only their version of it. Still others of the "Old Guard" wanted the old centralized system (p. 256). This conflict was an obstacle to perestroika, and it slowed its progress. Meanwhile, the newly liberated population expected a better life based on Gorbachev'spopularity in his early years. Such a change was not forthcoming. Perestroika was not a quick fix. Gorbachev did not break the bureaucracy of the old ways, and he did not empower the industrial managers in the way that was required to achieve true reform (p. 258). In a 1990 speech, he claimed he was being cautious and was moving slowly intentionally, and that to do otherwise was irresponsible.
15. With the raising of food prices in the winter of 1990-1991, shortages sparked public panic. Some prices elevated by as much as 130%, forcing many Russians to subsist on the charity of Western food agencies. This humiliated them and made them even more impatient for change with results (p. 261).
16. Added to all these pressures was a problem of a lack of pressure. By this I mean that when Gorbachev relaxed political and cultural pressures on the population, he opened the door to separatist nationalism. After all, the empire Stalin built was held together by force of centralized government. With this force removed, it did not take long for minorities to begin seeking their own destinies. Smith points out several of these groups seized the opportunity do this: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia, Georgia, and the Ukraine are some of these (p. 296). Ethnic violence was seen in most areas of the old empire. Most of the world used the term "Soviets" to describe citizens of the USSR. But, ethnically, there really is no such group. A Soviet is a worker's council, and the USSR was a hodgepodge collection of nations that were pressed into states. And while not all of the republics pressed with a nationalist agenda, Gorbachev's reforms gave them the chance to fight for their own voice and identity.
17. To the outside observer, this last example, nationalism, was perhaps the most elusive element in the fall of the Soviet Union. To members of the Western laity, until the early 1990s, the USSR seemed to be a homogenous society, one that was out to dominate America and the world. It was quite a surprise to learn of the many fractures that lay beneath the surface of the Iron Curtain. Political and economic problems began decades ago, and they manifested themselves in the social and nationalistic issues that Gorbachev grappled with near the end of the Soviet Empire.
18. What the future holds for the former republics is left to speculation. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the effects of the fall of the USSR will be felt for decades to come. It was quite a revelation to see the events as they unfolded within the closed Soviet society. But, as we have seen in this essay, this was no whim of fate. There were several mounting issues that helped thrust these people down the road to self-determination as they cast off the shackles of Communism. Political, economic, social and nationalistic issues were all at work behind the scenes.