Who was actually responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union?

Was it Ronald Reagan? Or, the Pope?

The system collapsed under its own weight.

Now I have a better understanding of what happened.

Not totally accurate.

He was the one responsible for creating the Truman Doctrine - the strategy of containment. And also Japan.

Why Japan? Because up until the eighties, most of the third world saw the clash between the U.S. and the Soviets as a nothing to do with them. No matter who won, they were still going to be far down the totem pole in terms of power and influence. But when Japan started beating the U.S. at its own game, suddenly they saw a model they could emulate. And they did.

Eventually this seeped into China and even the Soviet Union, and you had the fall of Communism.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

You also should give credit to Truman. n/t

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who told us the same thing even before Raygun was Governor of California. It was his opinion that they would be done in 20 years. He was very close.

100% correct. It collapsed under its own weight.

:silly:

Gorbachev. He believed in the inevitability of change in the Soviet Union, in my opinion. However, they had been pressured by every American leader since Truman, both ideologically and militarily.

Now I have a better understanding of what happened.

Calvin Klein.

either. The Pope and Lech Walesa simply sped up the process that Communism's own fundamental flaws were bound to bring about eventually. At the end of the day, Communism cannot work because of human nature. No utopian model can work for the same reason. Marx never clearly identified just how a nation would go from the dictatorship of the worker to pure Communism, he just kind of said it would happen. Command economies can never replicate the day to day innovations that a market economy had nor can they provide for the kind of specialization needed in an economy. The Soviets discovered this when their factories were not producing critical machine tools and smaller necessary industrial goods that they instead needed to smuggle in from other countries. In the end, it just doesn't work.

within. We knew that decades before Reagan's grandstanding.

Just like what bush is doing today, Russia ignored its infrastructure, pumping money into expansionist wars. Without the infrastructure, the economy collapsed.

We knew the USSR was on its last legs. More progressive individuals went there to help them transition to a market economy, but an orderly, long term change didn't stroke Reagan's massive ego. He wanted to take credit for the fall of the Soviet union. That's why we had the massive build up of our military. That's why we heated the cold war. It was all for Saint Ronnie.

This is a spin..Russsia overspended in Korea..VN .. and the cold war..Both Korea and VN were huge battles in that cold war..

When the Wall came down in 1989 ..freeing millions then the cold war had a type of triumph..It was also a modern miracle.{my spin again}

So give a thank you to Korean and VN Vets who fought a good delaying action..

Pope and Ronnie may have seen it comin...Give them a bow also..


My wife grew up under the iron curtain and when the wall came down she was able to travel more freely and of course met me over there and now we have a great son 6.5 ..so I say thanx for the miracle...

Now I have a better understanding of what happened. Especially, coming from someone who was closer to the event than I have ever came into contact with. Thank you for enlightening me.

my wife agrees with my theory {borrowed from others} and so do many VN Vets.

Vn is still portrayed as a senseless war...

However how does that message resonate with VN Vets or with the gold star families.? {which war make sense?}

USA outspent the Soviets and the 2 battles helped bring down that wall..

I also visited Cszezlovokia in 1996 and was thanked by many there JUST for being an American..The guard posts were still visible in Prague but with no soviet soldiers..

Too bad bush has wrecked the reputation of the USA among his other crimes..

He overthrew the ideological basis of the Soveit Union's existence when he ended policy dating from 1917 in industry and argriculture and when he posthumously purged Stalin and repudiated Soviet experience from 1929-1953. How could a country in their position last long given these events? In China they weren't so stupid, and only criticized "shortcomings" while upholding the existence of the PRC from 1949 onward.

I am not sure but the situation on the ground in the mid fifties was very dire. Mongolia was a very tense place, the ideological underpinnings of Maoist doctrine were so foreign to Soviet policy that they trusted dealing with Capitalists more than the Chinese.

That is one of the things that must have haunted his thoughts. Nixon's rapprochement with China, even after several years of a stable border situation, triangulated the Soviets horribly. The Soviets had to know that they might well be fighting a 3 front war.

When we reached weapons parity with the Soviets, and exceeded it, they had to regard meeting that challenge a different way than we saw it. It would require assembling at least twice the capability because fighting NATO *was also* fighting the Chinese, and possibly fighting a civil war all at the same time. Read 'WW3, August 5th, 1984' by the NATO chiefs.

Meeting the material and technological demands of the arms race gutted the rest of Soviet society. The Soviets' desire to support a Communist state in the gulf of Mexico produced an awful balance of trade. Sounds familiar.

The young adults who put down Prague grew into middle aged men who I believe had already lost the love of empire well before Afghanistan.

I think that Khrushchev saw a need to abandon cults of personality. The resources to make Stalin into another Lenin would not have been worth using, even if he had the will to do so. He came up through agriculture, I can only imagine what he choked down in watching Trofin Lysenko do his Lamarckist thing.

Besides, anyone who would tell Nixon to go f*** his grandmother is to be admired. Elliot Erwitt the photographer, born in Russia, witnessed it and got the famous picture of Nixon prodding Nikita.

And I have to believe that if the October Missile Crisis had occurred under his Stalin, or say Brezhnev, the ending would not have been so happy. I was a child during that, and I can tell you that going to bed at night fearing that the next light coming through the window would not be the sun sucked maximally to a six year old.

So maybe you have made me change my original answer of Stalin.
In the end, maybe Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon sealed the deal.

Now let me ask the next question. Was it a good thing that the Soviet Union fell? Would Perestroika have done more faster better? I know what ** would say, but Russia had a very unhappy transition out of a centrally planned economy by committee to a very weak and internally terrorized democracy.

Set the USSR on several courses that could not be reversed.

John Paul II (financially, spiritually and publicly) was one of the catalysts. PJPII advocated the peaceful, non-violent opposition to the communist government and the leaders of the Solidarity Movement will tell you that their opposition would have been violent and deadly if it had not been for PJPII's involvement.



Actually, the USofA's funding of Afghanistan's resistance to USSR's invasion and take over actually helped in the down fall of the USSR.
We taught OBL then and we funded him and his soldiers, we gave them the arms that are still being used to fight our soldiers in Afghanistan. What pissed of OBL is that we abandoned Afghanistan after they were successful in turning back the USSR forces and we did not help them rebuild their nation.

So OBL and the Afghanistan resistance fighters had a greater impact than St. Raygun, St. Raygun just funded them, trained many, including OBL and then turned his back on them. Raygun is more responsible for OBL than he is the fall of the USSR.

and movies being beamed through the "Iron Curtain".

And all those Kremlin bureaucrats, trying to keep up with or surpass the US for 40+ years...

:D

No one person was responsible for the fall. Like all things it was a combination of many forces.

n/t

People were beginning to see and hear about all the matyerial things enjoyed by the west and they wanted the same things. People were tired of standing in long lines for a simple loaf of bread. They certainly were not cowed into it by Reagan or the US in general.

Not that I'm a big Bin Laden fan OBL bled then pretty good in Afghanistan expediating the collapse of their economy. I would say the fundamental flaws of Communism itself brought about it's downfall but if you want to give people the credit for the actual ending of Communism in the late 80's and early 90's then you have to say Gorbachev, then Walensa and the Pope, and below them maybe OBL and the Afghanis, Reagan and other presidents. The idea that Reagan spent them into seeing the light is ridiculous. The people in the Soviet block themselves wanted the change so it was eventually going to happen, period.

their means.

You know, Nature doesn't fool around with stupid behavior.

This was what a late journalist who was in Hungary & the Czech Republic during that time. The profileration of these devices created a new media and network that helped accelerate the changes that happened in 1989 and spread the word.

For years the Soviet systems (each country had their own kleptocracy) was being out-manipulated by technology that opened up the eyes behind the "iron curtain" to things those governments couldn't control. First people got televisions then VCRs that showed "the good life" and then better communication systems that spread the word of that good life.

His best observation was that the night that the Berlin Wall came down, the biggest flood of East Berliners that night headed for the stores, then went home.

I give Raygun little credit...only to create the final economic madness that helped push the Soviet system over, but didn't cause it. I give John Paul II credit for rallying the hopes and spirits of the Polish people and others in Eastern Europe when there was little else and supporting the infrastructures that replaced the collapsed communists (something Raygun and Poppy Bush weren't prepared for).

I know that's overly simplistic. But really, Western pop culture, music, movies, etc., captured the hearts and minds of the Soviet and Eastern European youth.

It was the freedom and the individuality of our culture and art that caught their attention.

played significant roles. I would rate Reagan as one of the very worst presidents in US history. I do not like or admire anything about him. But he certainly played a significant role in bringing about the end of the Soviet Union. The pope played a significant role in undermining the Soviet grip on other countries, most importantly Poland.

You can't have a centrally planned economy; too inefficient. (Decentralization produces inefficiencies, but of a different kind)

You can't have an ideologically planned economy. It drives the apolitical geniuses into apolitical fields, and the political wonks into fields they don't belong in.

In either event, it left most people unwilling to go to great lengths to maintain quality. It finally got so bad in the '70s and '80s that production documents I've seen called for every part to undergo quality control, with the machinists required to replace defective parts on their own time.

Andrei Amal'rik in the late '60s wrote a little volume called "Will the Soviet Unit Survive until 1984?" He concluded it wouldn't it did, but barely. Scholars panned his work. The American Assoc. for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in fall 1992 had a panel entitled something like "How did we get it wrong?" The new PhD on the panel told the long-tenured PhDs how: they were blinded by their own aspirations and needs.

The USSR overreached: not only was its economy riddled with problems, but they had rather large military expenditures and widely subsidized movements and friendly governments abroad. If you take into account the difference in pay scales (Russian soldiers got nearly no pay ... like Chinese soldiers, unlike American soldiers), the army was a significant drain on the economy. It also got first dibs on all the decent production that it needed.

The liberalization of society under Brezhnev--various exchanges--helped. The Soviets had the most prosperous, fair, and technologically advanced economy on earth ... at least according to Izvestiya. While Izvestiya was saying how horrible it was here, Russians that got to the West bought everything they could and took it back. Oops. And when relative commoners started arranging to have American and Western pharmaceuticals brought in because the USSR didn't make them or couldn't make them, it hit home in a whole different sort of way.

The notion of empire and Soviet greatness held a lot of people enthralled. When you're winning, and glorying in your greatness, you put up with more crap than if your empire is collapsing. Word got back that all the various "liberation movements" subsidized directly or indirectly by Moscow were not all hunkydory. Then there was Afghanistan, which but the kabosh on Soviet pretenses to greatness: you have to remember that all these countries that became part of the soviet empire did so "willingly", by having a coup and the new rulers--even if not really in power--inviting in the Russians, or by having an election that resulted in one-party rule. The Soviets didn't like being rejected.

Sakharov and other dissidents played his role, as did the Helsinki monitoring group. The occasional impromptu non-representational modern art exhibit did so, as well, as did VOA and the various works of literature and polemics circulating in samizdat. Solidarnosc in Poland showed a lot of "evil empire folk" that there was a desire for liberalization in society. The Pope supported Solidarnosc very strongly. It certainly played a role; and by voicing public support, Karel Wojtyla played a role. As did people like Havel in Czechoslovakia.

The Reagan build up compelled parallel expenses in the USSR; it was one of the last straws forcing them to deal with their shoddy economy. Gorbachev was brought in to help fix the problems. Instead, it was a disaster: by liberalizing things, he wound up unleashing forces he couldn't control. At the time people were thinking he was going to preside over a new New Economic Plan (like Lenin had in the '20s, using the energy in capitalism to reinvigorate an economy wracked by war and the excesses of collectivization). But when he liberalized the social/political side of things, it exploded. The PRC has learned well: buy off people with money and things, but do not let them speak freely, unless they're freely speaking what you want.

Gorbachev wasn't a Brezhnev: Brezhnev squashed the Prague Spring. Whoever was in charge during the Hungarian 1956 (Khrushchev?) business acted properly, from the point of view of stability. Gorbie didn't; this encouraged ever more displays of public disapproval of the current order.

No government system is so vulnerable as when it's liberalizing. It's hard to proceed slowly or with measured steps.

It's arguable that without Solidarnosc or Wojtyla, the "anti-revolutionary movement" wouldn't have been emboldened in Poland to show the Soviets how it's done; without Reagan, there wouldn't have been the shock to the Soviet economy in the '80s, and the system could have been fixed enough to continue; without Afghanistan and failed or dubious liberation movements, the shock to Soviet notions of empire wouldn't have occurred; without Sakharov or samizdat, the Russian intelligentsia wouldn't have been emboldened or as large. Without Gorbachev--who was there because of the wretched economy--the liberalization might well not have occurred.

IMHO, minus Solidarnosc/Wojtyla, or minus Reagan, or minus Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union might well still exist.

and control. They basically imploded. Sound familiar?

child growing up in Riga. It all began to fall from that point on. Well that's what CNN tells me anyway.

Good sources on this subject are Randall Collins, Jack Goldstone, Theda Skocpol and Mustafa Emirbayer. It'd be very hard to explain the collapse with either internal structural elements ofthe USSR or the geopolitical landscape of the cold war by themselves.

Here's a link for those with J-stor access to a debate amongst these scholars on the issue. It's interesting to say the lease.

http://www.jstor.org/search/Results?mo=bs&si=1&hp=25&Search=Search&Query=Soviet+Union+Collapse+Predict+Collins+Goldstone+Skocpol

in Russia.

However, the fall of the SU was due to the size of the population outpacing the abilities of the government to sustain itself in that specific governmental model.

"It was the economics, stupid..."

The implosion of the USSR and of all similar structured states was predetermined. The system employed was unsustainable economically. All the "innovation" and scientific advancement was developed using way too high a fraction of GDP and created the illusion of economic progress where none existed.

Bascially, the dissatisfaction of nearly the entire population coupled with the expansion of the middle class in the west, plus the western innovation of communication technology doomed the Soviets.

My faciliator award is shared by Ted Turner and Gorbachev. Ted Turner showed the capitalist world there was money to be made in satellite broadcasting, including 24 hour news and info, so as that proliferated, the Soviets could no longer control the flow of information to the citizenry. I give Gorbachev the credit for recognizing the inevitability of collapse. He saw there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle and began his series of reforms to decentralize. I think he figured triggering the evolution toward more democratic and capitalist systems was a better idea than fomenting another revolution.

But, Reagan had almost NOTHING to do with it. He was just there when the system reached implosion pressures that could not be withstood. Same goes for JPII.
The Professor

Naturally, the fall was due to many causes. The the one that lead to the end at the specific point in history was the death of all the old true believer Bolsheviks and party hard liners throughout the empire. Those people had no trouble killing how ever many were necessary to keep the system going and maintain power.

Once Brezhnev and Andropov died, as well as the Eastern European puppets, the line of succession didn't really contain anyone tyrannical or cruel enough to maintain the status quo. In little time, people in the SSRs and satellites began to realize the central government was not going to suppress them. The Eastern Europe and the Baltic states made their move and Gorbachev didn't crush them.

Brezhnev's death really was the turning point. I don't think Reagan or the Pope had anything to do with that.

It wasn't Reagan. Ronald Reagan wanted to use the Soviets as a bogeyman to justify building up his own military. As a result, he ran both our country and the Soviet Union into the ground. (Ronald Reagan literally bankrupted America. One year--I think it was 1987 but don't quote me on that--Reagan spent twelve months worth of government funding in eleven months, which meant they had to push the end-of-month September payday to October, putting it into the new fiscal year.)

It wasn't Gorbachev either. He was trying to make a new and improved communist country. If he would have wanted to break up the USSR or turn it into a democracy he probably could have done that, but he didn't. Gorbachev's reform movement was specifically designed to retain the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to retain the Soviet Union itself. A free and democratic Soviet Union could have been interesting, but that's not what happened.

Now for this Shaposhnikov guy. In 1991 the hardliners in the Supreme Soviet staged a coup. They put Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempted to reverse all of the democratic reforms. Yevgeny Shaposhnikov was a colonel general and the commander of the Moscow Air Force. When the coup leaders attempted to arrest Boris Yeltsin, Shaposhnikov ordered his troops to get out a bomber, preflight it, fill it with fuel, hang a nuclear bomb on it, put a crew on it and park it at the end of the runway with a starting cart next to it. He then called the coup leaders and told them that if they arrested Yeltsin he was going to drop the bomb on the Kremlin. The coup collapsed and all its instigators were jailed. It damaged Gorbachev to the point where he retired. Gorbachev now runs a foundation.

Shaposhnikov was promoted to army general right after the coup, and very shortly thereafter to Marshal and Marshal of the Soviet Union. Now he runs Aeroflot...and he runs it with the intent of turning it into a well-regarded airline.

If Shaposhnikov wouldn't have offered to blow up the hardliners, we'd still have a Soviet Union.

The Pope, Lech Walensa, Reagan and Solzhenitsyn.

And any belief to the contrary is the result of bad intelligence...
:silly:

If you read the literature after the October Revolution, they knew Russia was a minor little country and were just holding out for Germany to have a workers revolution. Actually, there was something of an uprising in Germany at the end of WWI - troop mutinies, worker uprisings and the like. Hungary had a communist revolution in 1919 but it ended when Romania invaded. There were uprisings at that time in Italy as well (biennio rosso).

Anyhow, workers in Germany were split between the SPD (Socialist) and KPD (communist) and were thus split, when the Nazis came in, with a base among the lower middle class, and to some degree the rural population. The major Germany industrialists (Krupp, Voegler, Thyssen etc.) supported the Nazis when they saw their options running out (American industrialists like Henry Ford, DuPont etc. were sympathetic to fascism as well). So the NSDAP took over Germany. That was pretty much the end of things for Russia. By 1932 Russia was pretty much finished.

You might say it was all over in 1932, or you could trace errors back to 1917, or you could trace errors back to 1905 and before. Or perhaps the conditions just weren't right.

Hello from Germany,
I'm just surprised that someone here knows the background wo well.
Lenin really never believed in the possibility of socialism in one single country, surrounded by capitalism, and even less he believed in the possibility of socialism in one country at all, not to mention a country that wasn't industrialized and didn't have anything that resembles a civil society. Socialism was ment to be more than capitalist democracy, not less. They did just wait for a revolution to happen in Europe - and this didn't happen as it was expected, but it wasn't an illusion at all.


But if someone would ask me, why the SU after the 60`s did collapse, I would say: The Pope as much as Reagan did support the hardliners and stalinists in the communist party of the SU with the distorted and exaggerated vision of the SU they fabricated. They prolonged everything that was worth to be overcome in the SU and they destroyed everything that would have been worth to keep in the SU.

30% unemployment. More than 50% of people living in poverty: that's what the Pope and the right wing antisemit Lech Walensa did archieve in Poland.

A live-expectancy rate that's 5 years lower than under communism: that's what Reagan did archieve in the SU.

The majority of the people in the former "communist" countries lives under far worse conditions now than 20 years ago.

Gorbatchev, as much as the pope, both might have had good intentions, but esp. Gorbatchev might have been one of the most stupid and idiotic and failing leaders of the second half of the 20th century.
He wanted to establish a social democratic third way society in the former SU. The failure couldn't be bigger. He's one of the most hated men in Russia and he would have been forgotten long ago, if the corporations, to whom he sold out Russia would not invite and celebrate and publish his nonsense again and again and again.

Dirk

to put down the Spartacists and when both Rosa Luxemberg and Wilhelm Liebknecht were murdered in Berlin. (And Kurt Eisner assassinated by Count Arco-Valli in Muenchen). This halted the revolution in Germany. I think Stalin was more clear on this than Trotsky and thus Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Trotsky) was exiled and his faction exterminated as Counter Revolutionary Trotskyite wreckers.

I also miss people being comrades (genossen?). That eliminated one kind of sexism.

As Skinner elucidated above, the USSR bears a great deal of responsibility for its own demise.

But there was also Brzynski, NSA for Carter, who in 1978 started the Afghan war that bled the country finally and irredeemably to death...and set us on the course we now chart.

instead of "But there was also Brzynski".

"(...)On the contrary, there was Brzynski"

....and many more people in the USA, who are now much more prominent than during the 80's.

The very same people, who are selling the war against an international terror-network now, that doesn't exist, besides their efforts in Afghanistan long ago, to establish it.

If besides all the lies and the propaganda, the neocons have any kind of illusion - and the pope might have shared it - it's that they have toppled the Soviet Union.

And this isn't a minor issue. This is a very important question: if they did topple "communism", why not doing the same again in the middle-east, in Latin-America, in Europe....

Hello from Germany,
Dirk

consolidation of Stalinism and the centralized power of the state instead of the more humanistic model hypothesized by Marx and Engels. The people of the Soviet Union did their good work on behalf of all humanity in defeating the Nazis, at incredible price in lives and suffering, but the price they paid also included loss of the potential future a democratic communism might have otherwise achieved.

which was part of the Cold War between the USSR and America. They were going bankrupt trying to keep up, because communism was failing as an economic system.

Multiple factors were involved, many of which have been mentioned here. You can't point to any one thing or person and credit it with the fall of the Soviet Union. People who say "the Pope defeated communism" or "Ronald Reagan defeated communism" are just being overly simplistic.

who instead of opting for democratic socialism turned the government into a dictatorship. After that, it was just a matter of time.

When he instituted the command economy in the 1930s. Instead of allowing workers to decide how their resources should be used, the state did instead, and the state, being an authoritarian, undemocratic regime, reacted poorly to the needs of the people. It was simply unsustainable. The government spent money on guns and bombs but not on improving the lives of the people. As a result, their economy stagnated by the 1970s and into the 1980s.

The Soviet Union was doomed no matter who was president in the US. Reagan and the Pope provided a rallying symbol to the oppressed. This is why they're so highly thought of in many East European countries today.

who killed off virtually all the Old Bolsheviks and the Russian CP leadership in the purges and show trials and terror. The people who could have kept the USSR running were summarily wiped out. The Soviet state never recovered.

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