It was definitely initiated from the top down I would say. But at the end of the day, whatever mass strikes, work actions, and army mutinies occured were not enough to stop Yeltsin and the west from dissolving the SU into what it is now.
I don't want to mean this as blaming the average Soviet citizen but the fact is; whether from apathy with the old system, or naive hope that westernising would bring prosperity, or being outgunned by Yeltsins military, they and their organisations were sadly unable to defend the Soviet republics. All communists need to take sober lessons here. If it is the first task of the workers' party to instill a revolutionary spirit in the working class, the second and even harder one must be to convert that spirit into a mass commitment to the socialist project.
Biggest L of the USSR in my opinion is its lack of democratization over the years. After WW2, the soviet government and institutions were very much respected by the people, and the country well established in time and stability, and top spheres of institutions being too independent and not committed to a more, well, soviet (as in workers council) form of government, is a huge loss that paved the way for Glasnost, Perestroika and eventually the dissolution. The book "Socialism Betrayed" makes a really good depiction of this in my opinion.
None of this, though, means that the dissolution of the USSR was desired by its peoples for the vast majority of the people, with some possible exceptions in the Baltics and Georgia due to a history of nationalism and Russophobia being exploited during Glasnost. It's not a color revolution as happened in, say, Poland. It was a centralised, institutional process that didn't even involve the people of the country. It's because of this that it's important to me to make a point not to use the word "fall" or "collapse" of the USSR, and to make very clear that the dissolution didn't happen because of any economic failure or due to people's will as so many people believe, but that it was dissolved top down by a minority of individuals in the government against the overwhelming majority in an antidemocratic fashion, with no economic crisis involved other than the small one generated by Perestroika itself.
It was definitely initiated from the top down I would say. But at the end of the day, whatever mass strikes, work actions, and army mutinies occured were not enough to stop Yeltsin and the west from dissolving the SU into what it is now.
I don't want to mean this as blaming the average Soviet citizen but the fact is; whether from apathy with the old system, or naive hope that westernising would bring prosperity, or being outgunned by Yeltsins military, they and their organisations were sadly unable to defend the Soviet republics. All communists need to take sober lessons here. If it is the first task of the workers' party to instill a revolutionary spirit in the working class, the second and even harder one must be to convert that spirit into a mass commitment to the socialist project.
Biggest L of the USSR in my opinion is its lack of democratization over the years. After WW2, the soviet government and institutions were very much respected by the people, and the country well established in time and stability, and top spheres of institutions being too independent and not committed to a more, well, soviet (as in workers council) form of government, is a huge loss that paved the way for Glasnost, Perestroika and eventually the dissolution. The book "Socialism Betrayed" makes a really good depiction of this in my opinion.
None of this, though, means that the dissolution of the USSR was desired by its peoples for the vast majority of the people, with some possible exceptions in the Baltics and Georgia due to a history of nationalism and Russophobia being exploited during Glasnost. It's not a color revolution as happened in, say, Poland. It was a centralised, institutional process that didn't even involve the people of the country. It's because of this that it's important to me to make a point not to use the word "fall" or "collapse" of the USSR, and to make very clear that the dissolution didn't happen because of any economic failure or due to people's will as so many people believe, but that it was dissolved top down by a minority of individuals in the government against the overwhelming majority in an antidemocratic fashion, with no economic crisis involved other than the small one generated by Perestroika itself.