First, for several years the Soviet economy had faced stagnation. Citizens found employment in one of the , construction projects, far more than was needed, but reducing that number by two-thirds presented a real danger of mass unemployment. The ruble had only paper value, with Soviet citizens holding overall billion rubles, but they had nothing to spend it on; store shelves carried few consumer goods.
By December , citizens were roiling with discontent. Coal miners in the Arctic Circle struck for better living conditions, including soap and potatoes. Other miners followed suit in separate incidents. Land privatization was postponed and the budget deficit grew exponentially. Second, the Soviets had always feared the superiority of U. Soviet revenues devoted to defense would have to increase, further depriving ordinary citizens of revenues for medical research, infrastructure, and consumer goods.
Complaints from ordinary citizens soared. Third, nationalism in Eastern Europe and the USSR itself had become more pronounced as the dream of a classless communist society became illusory.
Among the peoples of both regions, there arose a gradual loss of ideological self-confidence. In its place, national pride against an externally imposed Soviet system had goaded the citizens of Poland and the Baltics to seek self-determination. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.
Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. Collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet Union. Everything must be done in a new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches, our views of the past and our future. And all of this — from top to bottom and from bottom to top. It has to be changed. Gorbachev and his group appeared to believe that what was right was also politically manageable.
The Soviet model was defeated not only on the economic and social levels; it was defeated on a cultural level. Our society, our people, the most educated, the most intellectual, rejected that model on the cultural level because it does not respect the man, oppresses him spiritually and politically. But one does not feel like it. Indeed, the expectations that greeted the coming to power of Gorbachev were so strong, and growing, that they shaped his actual policy.
Suddenly, ideas themselves became a material, structural factor in the unfolding revolution. In an instance of Robert K. Already at the end of , the first representative national public opinion survey found overwhelming support for competitive elections and the legalization of parties other than the Soviet Communist Party — after four generations under a one-party dictatorship and with independent parties still illegal.
Another year passed, and the share of the pro-market respondents increased to 64 percent. And so it was in Soviet Russia. To them, a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject.
And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Proud citizens of a proud nation! As usual, Tocqueville was onto something hugely important. From the Founding Fathers to the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, revolutionaries have fought under essentially the same banner: advancement of human dignity.
Languages and political cultures aside, their messages and the feelings they inspired were remarkably similar. He could have been reporting from Moscow in The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8 percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did.
Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened. Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed.
In Eastern Europe, inside the Soviet Union itself, the subject peoples were increasingly restless for freedom. It worked for a while. The Soviet leaders were not stupid. They knew something had to be done. In , after three decrepit leaders died in succession, they picked Mikhail Gorbachev to run the country: young, experienced, competent and — they wrongly thought — orthodox.
But Gorbachev believed that change was inescapable. He curbed the KGB, freed the press and introduced a kind of democracy. He was defeated by a conservative establishment, an intractable economy and an unsustainable imperial burden.
It was the fatal moment, identified by the 19th-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, when a decaying regime tries to reform — and disintegrates. Russians call Gorbachev a traitor for failing to prevent the collapse by force.
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