The collapse of the Soviet Union was a large and complicated affair involving dozens of different countries, many regions, and a lot of people. To explain why the Soviet Union collapsed we first need to talk about what the Soviet Union was.
In its simplest form, the Soviet Union represented a dream. A dream of a communist utopia where EVERY person works towards the greater good. A dream in which people would live at an unprecedented level of prosperity. A dream of peace and freedom… But it never even came close to that dream.
It started in 1917, in the Russian Empire. Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in the Russian Revolution by a group known as the ‘Bolsheviks’. The Bolsheviks were far-left revolutionaries. They were willing to try out a new ideology, an ideology called Marxism. This ideology was based on removing the class system by controlling the wealth of a nation collectively, where society as a whole controls the means of production, thus removing the lower-, middle-, and upper classes in society. And this new Marxist country was officially founded in 1922… but rather than turning towards the communist dream, it instead turned towards dictatorship. Under the rule of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union was slowly turned into a ruthless police state where anyone suspected of disloyalty could be sent to forced-labour camps… as well as random people regardless of their loyalty. The leaders who would reign over the Soviet Union during its collapse were also the ones who grew up in Stalin’s Soviet Union and experienced the cruelty of the regime firsthand. In the 1940s the Soviet Union found itself at war with Germany… During this war, the Soviet Union conquered much of Eastern Europe during world war 2. Some parts it annexed for itself and other parts became satellite countries. These satellite countries were indirectly controlled through the Warsaw Pact.
This pact was an agreement between the countries of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania… and for a short time Albania. The Warsaw Pact was a complicated agreement between the countries, but in simple terms, this agreement guaranteed military support from the other nations in case of war, economic integration of the member states, and used the threat of invasion to make sure that all its member countries remained communist and loyal to the Soviet Union.
After the Second World War, the Soviet Union and the United States of America became embroiled in a cold war. This basically divided the world between the capitalist United States and its allies versus the communist Soviet Union and its allies. This division was personified in the Iron Curtain, a series of border walls and fences dividing Europe in two.
When Stalin died in 1953, the new Soviet leaders decided to lift many of the most repressive policies. There were several reasons for this. The first was the moral argument: most people thought that a system of forced labour camps, constant fear, and abuse of power was morally wrong. The second argument was pragmatic: a system based on corruption, oppression, and loyalty was a lot less efficient.
And so the Soviet Union released prisoners, removed many systems of oppression, and even renamed many places bearing the name of Stalin or Lenin. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg and Stalingrad became Volgograd. Under this process people’s lives became a bit better: their living standards improved, they were allowed to say and do more, and the economy became more efficient.
But to many, it didn’t go far enough. The USSR, which is short for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which was the official name of the Soviet Union. The USSR was doing relatively well in terms of economic growth in the 1950s and 60s. But by the 70s and 80s, it was lagging behind. Its economy grew slowly, the leadership became averse to change, and some of the freedoms given were reversed.
This meant that while the lives of people in capitalist societies were improving, such as Japan, West-Germany, and the United States, the lives of the people in the Soviet Union and its allies remained at similar levels as the 60s. And in this moment of stagnation, in 1985, a new leader was elected to lead the Soviet Union. His name is Michael Gorbachev.
He was from a new generation of Soviet leaders, being the first and last Soviet leader to be born in the Soviet Union. And by the time he took office, it was clear that the Soviet Union had become stagnant for far too long. Something needed to change or else the entire system would slowly collapse.
The first thing was its economy. The USSR’s economy was a so-called ‘command economy’. In this system, many economic activities were planned centrally by the government. And the government prioritised the creation of machinery and large projects while giving consumer goods, innovativeness, and quality a much lower priority.
At the same time, the Soviet economy was also incredibly inefficient. What would happen was that the government would set itself a goal and then throw as many resources as was needed at the issue until they had the desired result… This meant that if a system was inefficient, it would receive more resources from the government to get the desired results.
So basically, the less efficient a system, the more resources would be spent on it. On top of this inefficiency, the government also spent a lot of money on weapons to compete with the United States for the prestige of being a superpower and sent money to the various Soviet client states to prop up their economies to show the world how great communism was as an ideology. And this latter part cannot be ignored. The Soviet leadership took policy not out of a pragmatic point of view of what worked or not, but instead created policy based on ideology regardless of whether it worked or not. And this blatant disregard of reality caused the Soviet Union to implement policies that simply didn’t work.
As a result, the level of healthcare was notoriously bad, housing was shoddy, and people’s diet was far less varied… all the while espousing how much better off the Soviet citizens were doing compared to the rest of the world. The last leader of the Soviet Union explained the Soviet economy quite well: “There is
plenty of everything: land, oil and gas, other natural riches, and God gave us lots of intelligence and talent, yet we lived much worse than developed countries and kept falling behind them more and more. The reason could already be seen: the society was suffocating in the vice of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race.” This is in stark opposition to capitalism. Under a capitalist economy, there are many different independent production lines, leaderships, and policies.
Each business, each organisation, each entrepreneur had to constantly compete with all the other ones to survive. If a company falls too far behind its competitor, it will eventually go bankrupt and thus remove the least efficient actors from the economy.
As long as a healthy capitalist economy is maintained. Gorbachev realized the state the Soviet Union was in and felt it was in drastic need of reform. He wanted the Soviet Union to finally realize that old communist dream, the dream of working towards the greater good, of prosperity, of freedom and peace. He felt that after Stalin, the Soviet Union should have given far more rights to the people and created a healthy communist system. Gorbachev wanted to end the secret police spying on people, feeling it was both immoral and a waste of resources.
He wanted to give freedom of speech and freedom of the press, believing that criticising the government would help the government to improve. And he wanted to end the tight grip on power at the top, instead of letting local leaders solve local issues which they can do more efficiently than a central government in Moscow. As Gorbachev’s foreign minister said it best in 1984: “Everything is rotten. It has to be changed.”
But the new leadership did not believe that the communist system as a whole was a bad system. They thought that the system the Soviet Union used was a bastardization of communism, a bloated bureaucracy unable to serve the people it governed. And therefore wanted a communist government not based on fear and suppression, but a communist government based on serving the people.
“I am not ashamed to say that I am a Communist and adhere to the Communist idea” But change isn’t easy and there are always those who oppose it. So the first thing Gorbachev did to make change happen was to remove many government department heads from their position and replace them with people more open to change. Many of those open to change were of the new generation like Gorbachev, well educated, and were just as frustrated with the lack of reforms from the previous Soviet leaderships as he was.
Some of those names you might even recognize, such as Boris Yeltsin, who would become the first president of Russia we know today. One of the first things this new Soviet leadership did was to improve diplomatic relations with the rest of the world.
This strategy had 3 goals in mind. The first was to attract foreign investors.
The Soviet Union had mostly been relying on its resources, but as the Soviet economy lagged behind developed countries, they saw opening up as a great way to get foreign resources into the country to grow the economy.
Secondly, if the USSR could openly trade with the rest of the world, it could export its own products and resources to the outside world, which would improve the economy.
And lastly, the Soviet Union wanted to improve diplomatic relations with their long-time rival the United States of America and its allies to end the cold war.
This way, the Soviet Union could stop the expensive arms race and spend those resources on building up the country instead of building up arsenals. While the USA announced to increase military spending to fight the “Evil Empire” that was the Soviet Union, the USSR announced it would stop participating in the arms race, was going to withdraw its troops from foreign wars such as in Afghanistan, and that it would reduce its military presence in its Eastern European client states.
The second major policy was to reform the Soviet economy. This reform was called ‘Perestroika’. This is a Russian word that means ‘restructuring’. What is often overlooked is that this ‘restructuring’ wasn’t a single policy, rather, it was an overarching term for various complex economic policies undertaken from 1985 to 1991.
But all these economic policies had one goal in mind: to increase the economic growth of the Soviet Union so its economy would become up to par with the Western economies. At first, it only included minor changes such as trying to bring foreign investments to the USSR.
But by 1987 a policy was implemented to overhaul the Soviet economy. The plan was to transform the Union from a command economy to a mixed economy.
What this meant was that rather than controlling all aspects of the economy from Moscow, some parts of the economy could be planned by local officials and by businesses themselves. These changes included letting people own a portion of the businesses privately, instead of fully owned by the state; businesses could set their own production targets based on demand.
While they would still need to produce a minimum amount set by the government, they were allowed to produce more and sell those products for a profit; businesses were allowed to determine their own prices, instead of mandated prices by the government; businesses became self-financing, meaning that they had to pay for their own wages, supplies, etc.
The government was no longer going to prop up failing businesses; And businesses would be owned by the workers instead of the government, giving employees of a business a stake in the operation of the said business; and lastly, the government was no longer going to formulate detailed production plans for businesses, instead it would only set general guidelines and investment policies, and businesses were free to figure out the best way to run their production.
But this was a mixed economy, not a fully capitalist economy. In the case of this new Soviet model, this meant that the so-called ‘means of production, such as machinery, was still owned by the government. But the transition didn’t go as smoothly as was hoped. This is because the Soviet economy relied on the central government too much and it would take time to transition to the mixed economy. During this transition, the economy would perform a lot worse…
But this transition wasn’t expected to last too long and people would notice the improved economic conditions in just a few years. But that didn’t happen and there are many reasons why.
The first is that the Soviet government didn’t know how deeply mismanaged their economy actually was. In fact, the state planning commission didn’t even have a model of how the economy functioned. It turned out that by no longer subsidising so many failing businesses, even fewer products were available to people as those businesses now needed to rethink how they were going to keep functioning. This led to shortages, so the government had to ration resources, which meant that there were long queues at stores that are often popularised about communist economies.
The second reason was that the government now earned less in tax revenue as the economy was slumping while increasing spending on things such as pensions. This caused the government to have a huge budget deficit, spending 12% more than they earned in taxes. Resulting in a government that was nearing bankruptcy. None of this would have been an issue if the USSR transitioned its economy fast enough. That way, it could have created a far more efficient economy that would produce enough products and become highly competitive. That economy would then allow the government to earn more in taxes and thus allow the Soviet Union to spend more money on improving the living standards of its citizens… But it didn’t.
In his farewell address, Gorbachev explained that “the old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working”.
And thirdly, aside from a shift in foreign policy and a shift in the economy, the Soviet Union also implemented a large set of policies giving people more freedoms. This was called ‘Glasnost’. This is a Russian word that means ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’. These policies included lifting the travel restrictions, meaning people could now travel to the west; previously-banned books and movies were allowed to be published; removing the tight grip of the omnipresent secret police; publishing secret documents about the Soviet Union concerning sensitive topics, such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; and lifting restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These new policies caused a flood of new ideas, ideologies, and political movements to form across the Soviet Union. It was an intellectual renaissance. Aside from personal freedoms, Glasnost also included political reform. The new Soviet leadership wanted a democratic Soviet Union. They did not believe that a communist country cannot also be a democratic country. In fact, many believed that the two were complementary.
Because if you need to answer to the will of the people every few years, then leaders would be held accountable for their actions to the same people they were ostensibly there to govern.
It is important to remember that the people of the Soviet Union and its communist allies were neither blind nor stupid. They were aware they were being lied to. They saw that the propaganda they were shown, conflicted with the reality they saw with their own eyes. But what they did not know, was just how much they were being lied to… until now. Because as glasnost flourished, people became more and more aware of the conditions in their country, while at the same time being allowed to criticize the government more and more. It was hoped that glasnost would spark a renewal in communist thinking…
But instead, the combination of worsening living standards and greater freedom to criticise meant that people weren’t thinking about improving communism… they were thinking about leaving communism. And as happens so often with the fall of empires, the troubles started at their fringes. Up until this point, everything had seemed relatively calm in the Soviet Union and their allies.
People were gaining more freedoms, the government was actively trying to improve the prosperity of its citizens, and it appeared that the cold war might actually end soon. There was a general feeling of hopefulness at the time. But then revolutions started popping up.
The first was in Poland in 1988, when people began protesting for workers’ rights, such as legalising trade unions. These trade unions then managed to bargain with the government to get freer elections in Poland. And as non-communist parties were now allowed to compete in elections, the trade unionists
formed their own party, competed, and won the election on August 19th, 1989. Giving Poland its first non-communist government since WW2. The most important thing that the Soviet government did during this Polish revolution, was NOTHING.
This wasn’t the first time a Soviet satellite state underwent a revolution. In 1953 the Soviets put down protests in East Germany. In 1956 Hungary’s revolution was crushed by Soviet forces. And in 1968 the Soviet Union, along with 4 other Warsaw Pact members, invaded Czechoslovakia because they were becoming too liberal, such as giving freedom of speech. But now… now the Soviet Union didn’t send in their troops… And this got people thinking… The next country to steer away from communism was Hungary. This country had always been one of the most liberal communist states. The Hungarians even had a saying for it: “Hungary is the happiest barrack, in the eastern bloc”. Mass demonstrations on March 15th of 1989 persuaded the Hungarian government to start negotiating with the new political parties that were forming in the country. These negotiations included an overhaul of the legal code, establishment of a constitutional court, and allowing free elections… Ironically, many of the people who are eroding Hungary’s democracy at the moment we’re part of those negotiations. General elections were held on March 24th 1990, with Soviet forces ending their occupation a year later on June 19th. Just as with Poland, the Soviet Union did not take any overt action to stop Hungary.
While in this process towards a freer society, the Hungarian government removed their border fence with Austria, opening the communist Hungarian border with the capitalist Austrian border. Thus creating an opening in the Iron Curtain. For the first time in decades, people could now move relatively freely between the communist east and the capitalist west. Many people who lived in East Germany at the time took this opportunity and decided to cross the border to Austria and continue to West Germany where they were treated as full citizens… East-Germany, which had the official name of the German Democratic Republic, or simply GDR, found these recent events in Hungary very troubling. In the ’50s 3.5 million people fled to West Germany. In response, the GDR built the Berlin Wall around West Berlin, which was controlled by West Germany. But with this opening, many people tried to use it to flee to the west. And so the GDR closed its borders with fellow communist countries, leading to nationwide protests. Unlike in Hungary and Poland, these protesters were arrested and beaten by their own government. As more people were being abused, more people showed up to protest… The GDR was counting on Soviet troops coming to support their government, but they never came.
And so, eventually, to appease protestors the borders were opened again and the GDR decided to let people travel to West Berlin directly… in a few months. But at the press conference where they wanted to tell people about this new policy, the press secretary mistakenly told reporters that the border would open immediately… But the words were spoken, the people had listened, and crowds gathered at the border checkpoints. As you can imagine, the border guards were more than a little confused when thousands of people showed up asking to pass through their checkpoint. With no instructions from their superiors, the guards relented and opened the gates to West Berlin. So many people wanted to travel back and forth that citizens took up chisels and hammers to open the wall themselves. And so the Germans themselves were the ones who tore down that wall. With the fall of the Wall, the process of German reunification was about to start when both governments decided that GERMANY. WILL. BE. UNITED! Free elections were held in January 1990 with German reunification occurring on October 3rd of that same year.
Next came Czechoslovakia with the Velvet Revolution. Czechoslovakia was the country that became the Czech Republic and Slovakia we know today. It started as a student protest on November 17th 1989. This was suppressed by riot police… but as usual; when the police beat down protesters, more protesters arrive. So too here. After 1 day the protesters swelled to 200.000, after 2 days they were half a million. After a week, on November 24th the communist leadership resigned. And on November 28th the government announced that free elections would be held and the barbed wire would be removed from its borders. In just 11 days the communist regime had effectively fallen, in June 1990 it held democratic elections, and in June 1991 the soviet troops withdrew from the country.
Bulgaria was late to the revolutionary parties that erupted around them. Demonstrations started in October and November but were suppressed by their government… but the Bulgarian leadership had seen in which direction the tide of history was flowing. Rather than waiting for the people to stage massive protests like elsewhere, the Bulgarian politburo decided to oust their leader just a day after the Berlin Wall fell. He was replaced with a more liberal communist and repealed restrictions on free speech and assembly. But rather than preventing more protests, it led to the first mass demonstration on November 17th of 1989 and the formation of various anti-communist movements. These movements demanded even more freedoms, such as allowing multiple parties into the government. Negotiations were held in 1990 with elections in June that same year. The ruling communist party abandoned Marxist-Leninism, renamed itself the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and won the next election.
And lastly came Romania… and unlike the other socialist states, the leader of Romania, a man named Nicolae Ceauşescu, did not want to give up power. He appeared to want to wait until the anti-communist uprisings were over and he could continue ruling Romania. But in Romania too, communism wouldn’t hold out.
As with many protests, it started over something relatively small: a Hungarian Calvinist Minister was arrested by the Romanian secret police on December 16th 1989, because his sermons offended the regime. This caused rioting and nationwide civil unrest. Ceauşescu was in Iran at the time and when he returned he ordered a mass rally in his support on December the 21st. Here he addressed a crowd of 100.000 people where he espoused the achievements of the socialist revolution… but only 2 minutes into his speech people started chanting the name of the city in which this Hungarian minister was arrested. Ceauşescu raised his right hand to silence the crowd, a tactic which had worked during his entire reign… but not this time. The people kept chanting. This right here, his stunned expression, this is the face of someone realizing that a revolution was unfolding against him, right in front of his eyes. The crowd booed and jeered at the man who only a week earlier controlled the country with an iron grip. Hundreds of protestors were shot. The next day the media reported that the defence minister had committed suicide, while this was actually correct, the military believed he had been executed and the army switched sides. Ceauşescu was captured, put on a mock trial, and was sentenced to death on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1989… only 9 days after the first riots. It was the bloodiest of the revolutions, with over 1.000 deaths. The youngest among them was only 1 month old.
At the start of 1989, the Eastern European countries were all considered stable socialist countries… by the beginning of 1990, all Warsaw Pact nations had experienced a political revolution… except the Soviet Union. It had thus far remained relatively stable. But 1990 is the year where this would change. It started with the Soviet Union allowing mostly free elections where people could vote for multiple parties, rather than only the communist parties. This allowed the various republics, which comprised the Soviet Union, to elect non-communist parties to their parliaments. Resulting in a wide range of new parties being registered all over the Soviet Union. This was supposed to revitalize Soviet politics, believing that competition would result in a more efficient political system that would better represent the will of the people… What happened instead was that most people who were unhappy with the communist government voted en masse for independence movements. This was most prominent in Lithuania. A new political movement won most of the seats in their parliament as part of the communist party. And thus they practically took over the party in Lithuania and Lithuania’s governance. A day after the elections the new Lithuanian assembly declared itself independent from the USSR. As a result, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lost the Lithuanian Republic… but rather than sending in the Soviet army as so many countries do, the USSR decided to implement an economic embargo on Lithuania. The Soviet troops already present in Lithuania didn’t intervene, but they didn’t leave either.
In those same elections, many other parts of the USSR also voted out the communist leadership, such as Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, and Moldova. Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991. But the other four weren’t declaring independence just yet. But by now people saw clearly that the Soviet Union REALLY wasn’t interfering. Not only did they let satellite countries erupt in protests… even within the regions of the Soviet borders there weren’t a lot of crackdowns. Neither Lithuania nor the other 5 non-communist governments faced any military reprisal from the USSR.
And as more people noticed that rebellions passed without a major backlash, more and more people started a rebellion of their own. One region after the other erupted in rebellion. Such as Azerbaijan, where the people destroyed fences and watchtowers along the border with Iran and overthrew the government in one town. Although here the Soviet army did violently crackdown on protesters, which alienated the local communists, and led them to unsuccessfully declare their own independence. Ukraine erupted in peaceful protests at the beginning of 1990.
While the government did oblige the local population, such as decriminalising certain religious practices. In their elections, people voted for new democratic parties. Tensions slowly rose with the Soviet leadership as Ukraine recalled all its soldiers fighting in Soviet conflicts, declared its economic sovereignty and declared its goal for independence, among many other things.
While not officially independent, they were clearly on track to do so. In Tajikistan, protests turned violent as people torched government buildings, shops, and businesses amidst a call for economic and political reform. In Kyrgyzstan, ethnic nationalist groups clashed with each other over the division of land from former collective farms, which were now being privatised. 300 people died. With the fringes of the Soviet Union becoming less unified, the USSR desperately tried to keep the country together.
To speed up the economic growth of the union, they launched the ‘500 days program’ which sought to reinvigorate the Soviet Union, to show the people and governments of the Union that the USSR was worth keeping around. This plan was meant to create the groundwork for transitioning the economy to become more competitive.
They would create a competitive market economy, similar to capitalism; with mass privatization of business, stop controlling the prices of products, join the global economy, and transfer even more power away from the centralised government and towards the local republics. A second initiative was to wholly transform the Soviet Union away from centralisation and oppression and towards a federation where every region was given equal rights and equal say in the affairs of the country and where every person, regardless of ethnicity or creed, were given equal rights. It was hoped that people would no longer protest for independence as a federation would allow each part to govern mostly independently. And to make sure that people felt that they had a say in this matter, the Soviet Union decided to ask its people if this is what they wanted. They held a nationwide referendum on March 17 1991.
The referendum asked people: “Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, which will fully guarantee the rights and freedoms of all nationalities”. While the referendum was boycotted in some regions, almost 150 million people showed up to vote.
In total, over 75% of people voted in favour of turning the Soviet Union into a federation. This wasn’t the only referendum taking place on that day, with various regions adding questions on whether they should become independent. Russia, for example, added the question about whether they wanted to have a president representing the Russian part of the Soviet Union. The Russian people agreed and in June of 1991 Boris Yeltsin became the first President of Russia. By now the Soviet Union was facing separatism across the nation and was ready to hand over power to the various regions of the USSR. And this was going to go into effect on August the 20th, with the signing of the New Union Treaty which would turn the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into the Union of Sovereign States.
This would hopefully keep the nation together. But many in the government didn’t like this idea at all, from the defence minister to the vice president to the head of the Soviet Secret Police. And so they tried to take over the government in a coup, to bring back the unity of the USSR. Their goals were to remove Gorbachev from power, return centralised power back to Moscow, and use military force to keep the Soviet Union together. Gorbachev was on holiday so the rebellious army put him under (holiday)house arrest, they announced the end of a free press, and sent the army to take over government buildings. The coup organizers expected massive popular support from the people, expecting to be hailed as saviours of the USSR… and people did come out in droves. But rather than supporting the coup, they tried to stop it. When tanks drove towards the Russian parliament building, people surrounded the tanks creating a human barricade until the tanks could no longer move without crushing the very people whose support they needed. President Boris Yeltsin raced to the parliament building where he met the pro-reform protestors, climbed atop the tank, and held a speech condemning the revolution. By August 21st, 2 days later, the revolution had clearly failed… but so had the attempt at turning the USSR into a federation. With the coup, many people across the USSR felt that Moscow wasn’t capable of governing them anymore and was no longer interested in preserving the Soviet Union in any form. From this moment forward, one region after the other would declare their independence from the Soviet Union.
This was the last proverbial drop in the bucket, that made the house of cards crumble. The first was Estonia which declared its independence on the second day of the coup, on August the 20th. Then came Latvia a day later. Then Ukraine on the 24th Belarus declared independence on the 25th Moldova the 27th Kyrgyzstan on the 31st Uzbekistan on September the 1st Tajikistan on the 9th Armenia on the 21st Azerbaijan on October the 18 Turkmenistan on October the 27th Russia on December the 12th And Kazakhstan on December the 16th… These countries, along with several regions which today are incorporated into other countries, declared their independence until there was almost nothing left of the Soviet Union.
And so, with every part of the Soviet Union declaring its independence, it was decided that the USSR was going to be dissolved. The Soviet Union was officially declared dead on December the 26th, 1991, at the age of 69. There were no grand ceremonies, no parades… Gorbachev held a short speech expressing sorrow over the fall of the union, frustrations of past mistakes, and hope for a better and freer people. After that speech, General Secretary Gorbachev resigned from his post. He possessed a quality lacking in most world leaders: He knew when to quit. Later opinion polls showed that the Soviet people felt it was time for him to move on. Not because they thought he failed, but because he had served his purpose: Under his leadership, the yoke of totalitarian dictatorship had been lifted… Even if in many of those countries that yoke would return just a few years later. And so ended the Soviet Union.
