The Internal and External and Factors That Shaped the Collapse of the Soviet Union - Essay Example

? The Internal and External and Factors That Shaped the Collapse of the Soviet Union Details: al Affiliation: Date of Submission The Internal and External and Factors That Shaped the Collapse of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union emerged out of the turbulent World War One as a revolutionary pariah state that soon evolved with rapid speed into a military giant with enormous influence beyond it boarders; an ideological model with conceivably secure and stable economy emulated by more than a third of the world’s population , at least for a time in history. Instinctively, the swift collapse of the Soviet polity caught many by surprise. As it was then, the astonishing fragmentation divides scholars right in the middle with little consensus over the triggering bullets. The dominant perspective point fingers at the American massive spending and the moral clarity under Ronald Regan as economically and ideologically bankrupting to the communist planned economy. On the flip side, the deterministic view argues that the collapse of the Soviet Republic was an inevitable occurrence due to the intrinsic inbuilt contractions of its managerial economics. But, what exactly were the real causes of the USSR disintegration? This paper examines the long-standing structural dynamics as well as the short term political catalysts behind the deterioration and the subsequent collapse of the hitherto well regarded Soviet empire. The stunning disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 is often heralded by most academics from the West as a triumphant victory of democracy and capitalism, as though the occurrence was a direct outcome of the combined Reagan -Thatcher ideological missiles. While this analytical stance may look somewhat self-congratulatory relative to the measurable facts, circumstantial evidence of the internal political dynamics of the Soviet state itself and its relations with the outside world tend to heighten affirmation of the same. Valerie Bunce concurs “the collapse of communism was not only abrupt, but inevitably long in the making”, and that the short term factors only provided fodder to the long term structural factors (p.xi). To begin with, the collapse of the Soviet Union was much a consequential effect of poor managerial aspects of the political system. According to the Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Communist Party was the vanguard of the proletariat. As such, its control of the political system was supreme, unquestionable and more so totalitarian; the party monopolized management of the state resources as well as all the undertakings of the society on behalf of the “universal, working class”-a multi-faceted ideological, conditional decorum of the communist system, at least at the expectation level. In practice, however, the party was firmly under the stewardship of a unique socio-political stratum namely the ‘nomenklatura’; the privileged party bureaucrats with preferential access to the state resources (McCauley, 2001, p. 86). With political legitimacy hinging on the ideological principles of the Marxist-Leninist canon underpinned by the coercive terror engineered by Stalin and operated through the security forces, the system “manufactured” leaders appropriate to it. So buttressed by sweet fear and intimidation that the subsequent leadership, those who disliked Stalin’s commanding tone included, could not quite disassociate with the world Stalin had created; yet a tone that upheld the system. Before Gorbachev’s initiation of perestroika in 1985, successive leadership beginning with Nikita Khrushchev-the immediate Stalin’s successor, made numerous changes to the system. With gradual ‘abandonment of mass political terror’, the subsequent regimes basically lost the original Stalinist control grips on society (Dallin and Lapidise 1995, p. 675). The consequential effect was an individualistic retreat into long-term cultural transformations that further weakened the founding principles of the Soviet system. Despite of the upsurge in the living standards of the general populace during the post war period coupled with the widening political space, skepticism and official worldview begun changing over the managerial aspects of the economy; the open intra-elite conflicts was more of a signaling effect to a growing shadow culture opposed to the corrupt Soviet universe. Not taking note of the apparent shifting social elitist stratification open to ideas from around the world, Brezhnevism corruption reached grotesque levels resulting into economic stagnation; and economic that that prompted wholesale rejection of the professed ascetic moral values advanced by the communist system (Dallin and Lapidise 1995, p. 676). By the 1970’s and early 1980’s, support to system began a declining trend. Ostensibly, a quite social revolution was taking place under a sleeping Brezhnev’s very nose. Evidently, the post Stalinist leadership took note of the widening social polarization of between the masses and the ruling elite. As such, a pro-public economic growth was thus a sure way of gaining political legitimacy. It is no wonder, therefore, that the post Stalinist era brought much transformation that by the Eighties, the Soviet Union had witnessed remarkable makeover from a largely peasant society into an urbanized, middle class population, just second to the united states at the time. The population progressively became well-educated, well informed with a considerable lesser degree to indoctrinate. From approximately 2 million just before the Second World War, the number of “specialists”, hitherto known as “the intelligentsia”, ballooned to over 30 million in the 1980s (Dallin and Lapidise, 1995, p.682). With a more industrialized society and an ever expanding specialization, the well informed middle class formed an embryonic ‘civil society’ strong enough to power profound influence into a large segment of the citizenry to challenge Party-state totality for a more liberalized, accountable Soviet polity. With rapid increases in literacy levels, the high mobilization that the system depended on increasingly undermined the communist ideology to it ultimate death. While the central planning system did revolutionize a predominantly peasant agrarian economy in the 1920’s and 30’s with huge developmental projects, the system proved awkwardly unreliable by the 1980s. Even though armed with authoritarian liquidation policy of all private property ownership and commerce, the “social contract” – supposedly with inbuilt guaranteed services and employment was terribly failing. The Bolsheviks’ Five-Year Plans, for instance, could not quite deliver the outsized quota as ordered by the central planning agency- GOSPLAN (McCauley, 2001, p.32). Despite the massive mismanagement of human and material resources during the Stalinist era, the massive investment in industrialization upheld progress. Contrary to the much hitherto bloated expectations from the system, the 1978-80s pigeonholed the system’s ineptitude with a complete halt in the economic growth in real terms; a surprising fact met with dissatisfaction among the Soviet elite concerning the planning system relative to the growing prospects in the Cold War enemy – the United States (Dunlop, 1993, p.4). The propagandistic superiority claims of the socialist way of life increasingly became unpalatable; while free, social services were of poor quality, the supply of consumer goods could quite service the high demand. Notably, “The buying habits of citizenry demanded more and better goods than in the past, and that while demands of people had significantly grown, the industry trailed along much behind them” (Colton, 1986, p. 49). The failure of the Soviet command-administration to introduce more intensive, refined, specialized hi-tech methods of production in the sixties and the seventies had weighty implications for the subsequent regimes. With worker dissatisfaction carried forward from the seventies, the eighties witnessed dipping productivity courtesy of alcoholism-driven absenteeism worthy of note by Gorbachev himself in 1985 (Colton, p. 51). The inefficiency created by a faltering central planning system also had its way in depressing low productivity even further; with very little consumer goods to buy, savings shot up artificially high to motivate meaning for work. Essentially, many months of stocked savings added impetus to the growing restiveness of the population, thus the rising rates of alcoholic-absenteeism. Regrettably, the rigid Kremlin was shot of options to match up the ‘growing technological gap between the Soviet Union and their rivals in the West”; a fact that exerted more pressure beyond comparatively imaginable economic revival (Malia, 1994, p. 37). Star Wars program (the arms race) was not only unfeasible in Kremlin budget estimates, but posed an unmatchable technological and economic challenge that further exposed the system to the forces of the capitalist world. Beyond the population centric factors, the Soviet aging capital stock failed to attract new investments to boost the overall Soviet production capacity. Given the planning system, firms never bothered to live within their means, or at least to adjust their production possibilities in response to the market forces of demand and supply. The system was further pushed to the periphery by the mere lack of hard budget constraints; Bureaucrats in solved production shortages and were further responsible for finding markets for finished goods (Aslund, 2007, p. 15). More specifically, shortages found the easy fix mechanism more money printing. By 19991, the Soviet Union’s currency had not only lost considerable value in the system but held meaning, and the switch barter system was fast underway. By the time of disintegration was effected, inflation rates nearly three in digits (Aslund, 2007, p. 19). Stalinist policy of detente that basically cut off Soviet society from the ideas of the west was another factor that did influence the collapse of the rival superpower. As academics and the Soviet elite poured into the masses the “goods” of the western norms, styles and practices, commitments to the Soviet Orthodoxy begun a fast downward trend (Dallin and Lapidise, 1995, p.681). The exposure to the superior living standards in the west in addition to the political freedoms resulted in widespread jitters in the late seventies through to the Eighties ultimately forcing the introduction of Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’. Instead of rectifying the hitherto growing dissatisfaction, ‘glasnost’ unveiled the ills of the Stalinist era further bringing into question the ideals of communism and legitimacy of the regime itself. In reality, ideologies advanced by Gorbachev and his fellow offspring of the system could quite survive exposure to the truth. With legitimacy lost in principle, Kremlin had little options other than to succumb to the wishes of the masses (Malia, p.435). Despite, long term the structural weaknesses that had bombarded the Soviet system left right and center, short term influences arguably converged with above explained long term factors to tip the system toward disintegration. Though vigorously contested, the costly Influence of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the Soviets’ Afghanistan intervention, the decline of international oil prices and the nationalism exhibited by the disgruntled minorities generally planted seeds of discord into the continued stay of the union. Peter Schweitzer notes that the military build-up during the Reagan presidency squeezed the Soviet’s already dwindling resources into unnecessary competition: “Though faced with catastrophic drops in their income, Soviets had to contend with the prospect of diverting more of their dwindling resources on an arms race. For the first time since 1960s, the US spending on militarization actually surpassed the Soviets’ during Gorbachev’s reign. SDI was conventionally founded on high technology, a conceivably comparative area of weakness to the Soviets at the time. The use of computers among other technological advanced gadgets was threatening to make old weaponry obsolete. Gorbachev himself noted the acute impact of scientific and technological competition arguing that progress on the other end had merciless effects on those dropping behind” (Schweizer, 1994, P.4). The result of Gorbachev’s leadership was a projected spending rise of up to 45 percent between the years 1981 and 1985. Nevertheless, even with Soviet military spending increases, they could not keep up with their rivals spending; a shift that thoroughly weighed on the already suffocating Soviet economy (Schweizer, 1994, P.195-196). Another military conflict that had a destabilizing effect hastening the disintegration was the Soviet intervention in support to the crumbling Communist Afghanistan in 1979. Almost immediately, the US alongside Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China started funding the mujahedeen fighters to counter the Soviet forces. By 1985, the mujahedeen were serviced with satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets, communications and weaponry by the American CIA. As is they were not done yet, the mujahedeen received Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Blowpipe missiles from the British that further undermined and realigned the Soviets’ reliance on air power and the rebels’ strength respectively; a fact that probably informed Gorbachev’s withdrawal decision in 1987 (Wallander, 2003. P. 146-147). From a financial viewpoint, the Afghan war strained the vulnerable fiscal situation that was already swimming under the effects of high international oil prices and the rather off balance-of-trade. During the turbulent, international oil market, prices fell from $76 in 1982 down to $20 per barrel in 1986, thereby shrinking the Soviets’ over reliance on oil revenues three fold. To offset its burgeoning budget deficits, the union had to contend with a bloated debt burden. In real terms, USSR lost averagely $20 billion for the entire duration of the crisis, money without which pushed the country simply into extreme crisis (Dallin and Lapidise 1995, p. 677-80). Finally, nationalists’ revolts against Communism, particular in Poland, further subverted the Soviet’s hold of a system that seemingly encouraged growing dissent within and without the empire. Gorbachev’s intervention with the ‘glasnost’ did not help but compounded national grievances and the subsequent unilateral calls for independence. The factors that finally nailed the disintegration of the Soviet Union were complex blends of very old and new, emanating from all angles-internal as well as external- gradually anchoring into a deterministic end. With leadership that lacked foresight into a ‘building perfect storm’ with deepening economic crises under their very watch, the tactless breakaway from the original Stalinist principles to Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ only christened a final blow to a bankrupt system in all fronts. Though peaceful, any further forceful cover-ups would have unleashed a bloody disintegration. References Aslund, A. (2007) How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bunce, V. (1999) Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Colton, T. J. (1986) Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Dallin, A. and Lapidise, G. W. (1995) The Soviet System, From Crisis to Collapse. Boulder: Westview Press. Dunlop, J. B. (1993) The Rise of Russia and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Malia, M. (1994) The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. New York: Free Press. McCauley, M. (2001) Bandits, Gagsters and Mafia. London : Pearson Education. Schweizer, P. (1994) “Who Broke the Evil Empire?” National Review, 46 (10), pp.46-49 Wallander, C. A. (2003) “Western Policy and the Demise of the Soviet Union.” Journal of Cold War Studies, 5 (4), pp.137-177. Read More