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The End of Bipolarity Part 3 - WHY DID THE SOVIET UNION DISINTEGRATE?

WHY DID THE SOVIET UNION DISINTEGRATE?


How did the second most powerful country in the world suddenly disintegrate? This is a question worth asking not just to understand the Soviet Union and the end of communism but also because it is not the first and may not be the last political system to collapse. While there are unique features of the Soviet collapse, there may be more general lessons
to be drawn from this very important case.

There is no doubt that the Internal weaknesses of Soviet political and economic institutions, which failed to meet the aspirations of the people, were responsible for the collapse of the system, Economic stagnation for many years led to severe consumer shortages and a large section of Soviet society began to doubt and question the system and to do so openly. Why did the system become so weak and why did the economy stagnate? The answer is partially clear. The Soviet economy used much of its resources in maintaining a nuclear and military arsenal and the development of its satellite states in Eastern Europe and within the Soviet system (the five Central Asian Republics in particular). This led to a huge economic burden that the system could not cope with. At the same time, ordinary citizens became more knowledgeable about the economic advance of the West.

They could see the disparities between their system and the systems of the West. After years of being told that the Soviet system was better than Western capitalism, the reality of its backwardness came as a political and psychological shock.

The Soviet Union had become stagnant in an administrative and political sense as well. The Communist Party that had ruled the Soviet Union for over 70 years was not accountable to the people, Ordinary people were alienated by slow and stifling administration, rampant corruption, the inability of the system to correct mistakes it had made, the unwillingness to allow more openness in government, and the centralization of authority in a vast land. Worse still, the party bureaucrats gained more privileges than ordinary citizens. People did not identify with the system and with the rulers, and the government increasingly lost popular backing.

Gorbachev's reforms promised to deal with these problems. Gorbachev promised to reform the economy, catch up with the West, and loosen the administrative system. You may wonder why the Soviet Union collapsed in spite of Gorbacher's accurate diagnosis of the problem and his attempt to implement reforms. Here is where the answers become more controversial, and we have to depend on future historians to guide us better.

The most basic answer seems to be that when Gorbachev carried out his reforms and loosened the system, he set in motion forces and expectations that few could have predicted and became virtually impossible to control. There were sections of Soviet society which felt that Gorbachev should have moved much faster and were disappointed and impatient with his methods. They did not benefit in the way they had hoped, or they benefited too slowly. Others, especially members of the Communist Party and those who were served by the system, took exactly the opposite view. They felt that their power and privileges were eroding and Gorbachev was moving too quickly. In this 'tug of war', Gorbachev lost support on all sides and divided public opinion. Even those who were with him became disillusioned as they felt that he did not adequately defend his own policies.

All this might not have led to the collapse of the Soviet Union but for another development that surprised most observers and indeed many insiders. The rise of nationalism and the desire for sovereignty within various republics including Russia and the Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Ukraine, Georgia, and others proved to be the final and most immediate cause for the disintegration of the USSR. Here again there are differing views.

One view is that nationalist urges and feelings were very much at work throughout the history of the Soviet Union and that whether or not the reforms had occurred there would have been an internal struggle within the Soviet Union. This is a 'what-if of history, but surely it is not an unreasonable view given the size and diversity of the Soviet Union and its growing internal problems. Others think that Gorbachev's reforms speeded up and increased nationalist dissatisfaction to the point that the government and rulers could not control it.

Ironically, during the Cold War many thought that nationalist unrest would be strongest in the Central Asian republics given their ethnic and religious differences with the rest of the Soviet Union and their economic backwardness. However, as things turned out, nationalist dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union was strongest in the more "European and prosperous part- in Russia and the Baltic areas as
well as Ukraine and Georgia. Ordinary people here felt alienated from the Central Asians and from each other and concluded also that they were paying too high an economic price to keep the more backward areas within the Soviet Union.

TIMELINE OF DISINTEGRATION OF THE SOVIET UNION


1985 March: Mikhail Gorbachev elected as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; appoints Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Communist Party in Moscow: initiates a series of reforms in the Soviet Union

1988: Independence movement begins in Lithuanian, later spreads to Estonia
and Latvia

1989 October: Soviet Union declares that the Warsaw Pact members are free
to decide their own futures, Berlin Wall falls in November

1990 February: Gorbachev strips the Soviet Communist Party of its 72-year-long
monopoly on power by calling on the Soviet parliament (Duma) to permit multi-
party politics

1990 March: Lithuania becomes the first of the 15 Soviet republics to declare its
independence

1990 June: Russian parliament declares its independence from the Soviet Union

1991 June: Yeltsin, no longer in the Communist Party, becomes the President of
Russia

1991 August: The Communist Party hardliners stage an abortive coup against
Gorbachev

1991 September. Three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania become
UN members (ater join NATO in March 2004)

1991 December: Russia, Belarus and Ukraine decide to annul the 1922 Treaty
on the Creation of the USSR and establish the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS). Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan Join the CIS  (Georgian's later in 1993): Russia
takes over the USSR seat in the United Nations

1991 December 25: Gorbachev resigns as the President of the Soviet Union; the
end of the Soviet Union

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