In an honest way the Union was doomed from the moment the German revolution failed. Now they had to build up forces quickly and basically 1v1 the entire world. If the Germans succeded the Union would be alive and the USA would be dead

There are missteps all along the way, but honestly, I still put it down to the double whammy of perestroika and glastnost.

Reforms like that should be done one at a time, at a minimum. If you’re going to reintroduce market elements into the economy, do so slowly, and with careful management of the political process. Instead they decided to also change up the electoral system, as well as allowing American media free reign.

The conclusion, for the record, that the Chinese govt has come to is that they let go of Stalin’s knife. In repudiating him, the USSR both damaged confidence in its own system and history, and also lost the means of steering the Union. It’s why, despite having significantly greater fuckups than Stalin, including going to war with his own Party, Mao was never fully repudiated.

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

—Xi Jinping, 2013

To answer this question you need to ask why did Gorbachev come to power in the first place? It is obvious to everyone that he is not a communist and that he probably never was.

• He came to power because by the 1980s the USSR had lost its way so much that it was struggling to justify its existence. The mindset of 'outcompeting' the west has its roots in the 1920s but really became front and centre of the Soviet mindset in the 1950s after Khruschev became leader. This meant that the Soviet government instead of focusing on revolution and anti-imperialism, instead started focusing almost purely on economic growth and geopolitical dominance.

• Due to the underdeveloped nature of the country, bad economic reforms, and just poor management of the economy in general, the Soviet economy was never able to surpass that of the US despite indications that it would be able to do so. The lack of other major allies and the decline in global popularity of Marxism-Leninism in from the mid-1970s onwards damaged its ability to project power and the country became increasingly weak.

• When you define success as being more powerful in a bourgeois imperialist sense than the capitalist west and then fail at that goal, it is no surprise then that people start looking at adopting their systems and ways of thinking in order to achieve that goal, this is where Gorbachev comes in. When he opened up the channels of communication to everyone people began communicating their long-suppressed views. Views that namely were, questioning the existence of such a political Union, with an extensive apparatus of repression and rigid economic and political thinking. For many of these people, these institutions had not delivered on their promises of improving the lives of people and keeping them safe.

• The USSR was never meant to be a socialist equivalent of the Russian Empire, however that is what it pretty much ended up becoming. The emblem has a globe on it for a reason, it was supposed to be like the EU, a union of socialist nations that was constantly expanding and did not favour any one nation, granting autonomy to all. Instead because of the way it was constructed, especially after world war 2, it was pretty much defined as Greater Russia and Russians were increasingly given a privelaged position. This caused the alienation of other nations, especially the Baltic states, which had strong national identities and were absorbed into the union through a dubious referendum which no one believes represented the true views of the peoples it polled.

• In terms of social progress, there was not much after the 1930s. Women's rights were better than the west, true, but they did not keep progressing, and most of the visions of the revolution were forgotten about. Men continued to dominate most higher-level positions and women continued to be relegated to domestic work on top of their careers. Homosexuality was illegal from 1931 onwards and afaik no attempts were made to decriminalise it until after the USSR fell. In terms of the economy, the advance towards communism stopped after the 1940s, every economic reform after that was a regression into more capitalist relations.

• There were also few efforts to reform the prison and repression systems, despite the fact that they were deeply loathed by the population and were moreso run to protect the state from unrest rather than to suppress class enemies and resolve contradictions. The fact that in the 1960s and 1970s you could find circles of Marxist Leninists at universities being persecuted for arguing that the government was not fulfilling Lenin's ideals set out in State and revolution tells you all you need to know. A punitive rather than transformational approach to justice was taken, and this imo was one of the biggest flaws of the Soviet Union, it created a lot of unnecessary suffering and prevented the society from moving towards more progressive social forms.

Ultimately when you have a bunch of problems, remove/suppress the revolutionary mindset to dealing with them, and promote the liberal mindset instead, you end up with Gorbachev.

Ussr was sadly doomed from the start. Cpsu / cprsfr was put in the position of trying to build capitalism and then socialism on top of a war ravaged feudal nation with, forget outside help, but constant attack from the most powerful nations in the world. If it could have been saved it would have been to (somehow) end the cold war and make peace with the west Ala China but the China USA peace was only really allowed to happen bc it was a thorn against the Ussr. So yeah it was doomed.

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1. Barbarossa
2. Sino-Soviet split

do not neglect to account for the decades long campaigns of harassment, sanctions and black ops from capitalist powers, as well as undermining by domestic roaders and liberals

Revisionism

Here's a 45 minute video by Vikki 1999 on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAMj47hFy1s

The inability for the Soviet Union to give more independence or political freedom to it’s satellite states, and freaking the fuck out when states weren’t following the strict set of guidelines from Moscow, (also party leadership changing the internal politics and Moscow relationship of it’s satellite states every time a Soviet Leader died/changed their mind on how to operate it’s states, Belarus comes to mind.)

Belarus wasn't a satellite state tho? It was a part of the USSR. What exactly do you have in mind here?

Seeing as the various different "satellite states" had various different policies, i.e. the more liberal Polish and Hungarian forms of economic policy when compared to the GDR or the split in the foreign policy of Romania when refusing to invade Czechoslovakia in '68, or not supporting Ethiopia when Somalia invaded, I think it's unwise to paint the Soviet bloc as the USSR and a bunch of puppet regimes. Those countries each had their own policies set by their own parties, admittedly with heavy influence from the Soviets. How much more "independence or political freedom" would you have asked for?

I think there were several underlining economic issues that causes the Collapse:

• Lack of foreign currency reserves, which were need to buy raw material. I read somewhere that in exchange for letting Poland initiate reforms, the USSR got foreign currency aid. Once the eastern bloc started to fall, it became harder to access foreign markets and maintain foreign currency reserves for trading
• Another issue was the informal economy that existed between state companies in the USSR. Since the government frankly failed at properly allocation resources , state companies would trade certain resources to get the other resources/items they need to fulfill their manufacturing quotas. This lead to mining companies requesting extra stuff like leather or rubber that they didn't really need, but could exchange for stuff like wheels or trucks that they need. As you might infer, this lead to chronic material and good shortages.
• Fraud. Simple many individuals in the party were corrupt. The move to a open economy allow these people to cash in their ill gotten gains. See Soviet Union Cotton Scandel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inomjon_Usmonxo%CA%BBjayev Prior to dissolution, many criminal party members were just hording their wealth in gold or other precious objects. There's problem many there reasons but these are just a few major one.

Some economic context leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union: A larger portion of Soviet industrial output was being devoted to the military during the later era of the Cold War which increasingly siphoned away the skilled manpower of Soviet scientists and engineers from other more productive economic sectors. A Western capitalist imposed technological embargo on the Soviet Union also damaged industrial development and innovation.

The Communist Party had developed an overrepresentation of a strata of managers, intelligentsia, and the more skilled technical and professional employees in its membership which gave them disproportionate influence within the Soviet government during a time when Soviet economic growth was slowing down to US levels (after the years of the “stability of the cadres” policy that defined the Brezhnev era) as these strata compared themselves to their American managerial and professional counterparts that had disproportionately benefited from the rise in US national income in the 80s (the smaller income differentials among occupations in the Soviet Union were seen as more tolerable by these strata in previous decades in the Soviet Union as economic growth had been much higher then with all groups seeing their incomes rise at higher growth rates).

There was severe erosion of public economic confidence during the Perestroika reform era from a large rise in inflation that was a consequence of a revenue crisis due to a host of factors that led to excessive reliance on credit from its central bank. The Soviet Union saw significant losses in export revenues from the global oil price collapse from the 1980s oil glut (largely thanks to Saudi Arabia) after structuring its economy into being excessively dependent on the export of oil. Many of Gorbachev’s policies also thoroughly backfired by exacerbating revenue problems with his ban on alcohol that only marginally improved labor productivity while depriving the state of a critical source of revenue in alcohol taxes as well as his promotion of decentralization that allowed for local governments to withhold tax revenues from the central government and Gorbachev’s large reductions in turnover taxes on enterprises under the belief that the managers would make better use of the revenue than the state. The lack of foreign exchange reserves and the ultimate costs of the Soviet-Afghan War and handling the Chernobyl disaster further financially crippled the Soviet Union in its last years. In 2006 Gorbachev wrote "The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union."

In contrast to the reform process in China that sought to preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat and the rule of the Communist Party (after installing ideological discipline in the CPC with the Four Cardinal Principles) to more carefully ease the transition with dual pricing systems towards the development of more of a long-term NEP-style transition phase predicated on bringing in foreign investment and forced-technology transfers, Gorbachev naïvely wanted to quickly remake the Soviet Union as a social democracy. Gorbachev's establishment of the Glasnost policies ultimately further empowered Boris Yeltsin’s kleptocratic anticommunist faction (that had grown increasingly larger throughout the years of ideological decay and corruption in the Soviet government after Stalin’s death) at the same time as he was attempting to execute the Perestroika reforms. All of these factors contributed to a significantly more chaotic reform process with older economic mechanisms of planning often being dismantled faster than new economic mechanisms could be put in their place as traditional supply-demand relationships broke down and further contributed to shortages.

It had to have been that it was the pressure of having to modernize and comepete with us, while we were threating to end the work is radioactive hell fire af any moment. Like, if we just let them vibe it would have been fine and the underlying structjral issues could have been adressed. Obviously that has worked for china.

I am pretty sure that even at the end their numbers were still okay and the vote to disolve looked a little sus. Especially given how things have gone after thr vote.

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