In the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks assumed that Russia was already in an advanced stage of the modern bourgeois society, and was therefore ready for socialism, hence the revolution that successfully took place to remove the old order. Not all historians, however, agree with this. Anderson suggests that the 1917 revolution was not one against capitalism, but one against feudalism.7 If indeed this were the case, the Bolsheviks were in effect trying to create socialism before, according to Marx, it was theoretically possible to do so. This raises the possibility that the Soviet system was destined to fail from the start. Even according to their own philosophical beliefs, if they did indeed overthrow feudalism and not capitalism, there was no way the Bolsheviks could have succeeded over any period of time.
However, I personally am not persuaded by this line of argument, primarily due to its basis in the Marxist view of history. While I would not go so far as to suggest that the Russian Empire in 1917 was a society based upon feudalism, there is no way it could be described as being in the advanced stages of capitalism. However, I do not believe that this would necessarily impede the implementation of a socialist system. While Marx asserts his views about the linear nature of history, there seems very little substantive evidence to support it. It would be wrong to argue that the Soviet Union could never have succeeded just because it seemed to contradict one of Marx’s beliefs.
There is also a third theoretical consideration that also should be considered. Especially popular among right wing thinkers is the idea that a centrally planned socialist economy simply cannot function over a sustained period of time. A functioning socialist economy was perceived by some as a contradiction in terms.8 They suggest that the operation of a complex economy based upon principles that something can be worth other than what people are willing to pay for it is simply not possible.
This idea is much less simple to dismiss than the previous ‘doomed from the start’ theories. It is indisputable that in the post war years, rates of Soviet economic recovery were at least equal to those of the western market based economies, and indeed rates of growth were substantially higher during the 1950s and 60s. However, there are flaws with using this evidence to argue that central planning is as effective as the market.
Firstly, the Soviet Union and the western nations were not at similar stages of economic development. Indeed, the Soviet Union could have been seen as industrialising properly for the first time, whereas the West was rebuilding. It is common to see extremely high growth rates during the initial industrialisation of a state: Between 1965-90, newly industrialising East Asian countries economies grew on average 6.7% per year. In the industrialised Europe, growth was 2.7% per year.9 These comparisons are between nations following similar economic models i.e. free market capitalism but simply at different stages of development. It is therefore improper to suggest that central planning is in some way as successful as the market economy just over this limited timescale.
When looked at over a longer period, the possibility that the centrally planned economy cannot function as successfully as a market economy seems even more of a possibility. In the 1970’s growth rates fell in Russia and were never to regain their highs of the 1960’s again. In China, another centrally planned economy, growth rates were stagnating until introducing market reforms in the 1980’s. Throughout that decade, growth averaged 9.3%.10 It should also be remembered that, as shall be argued later, economic problems that forced Gorbachev to carry out reforms that would finally destroy the system. It is possible, therefore, to suggest that there are some inherent problems associated with a centrally planned economy, although it is very difficult to say fore sure that these flaws are by definition an aspect of a planned economy. It could equally be that the idea was just poorly implemented in the Soviet Union. On balance, however, I feel the evidence is strong enough to retain this theory as a possible factor in the Soviet collapse.
Problems developing within the Soviet Union
Another common theory used especially by Marxist-Leninist scholars is the ‘traitors thesis’. The theory basically suggests that after Stalin’s death in 1953, the leadership of the Soviet Union passed to a group of anti-socialists, beginning with Nikita Khruschev, whom betrayed the 1917 revolution and held basically capitalist ideals.11 To put this more simply, adherents to this theory argue that the collapse of the Soviet system was no accident, more a cumulation of the efforts of successive leaders who had deviated from the true socialist route.
It is true that Khruschev did make some quite major departures from the policies of Stalin. For example, in 1957 he proposed the decentralisation of the industrial ministries12, whereas Stalin had made consistent efforts to collectivise and centralise the economic, social and cultural life of the nation. Indeed, Khruschev did criticise some of what Stalin had done. He blamed the rule of terror from 1936 of damaging the party and acted to reduce the role of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. On first sight, it would appear that there is some evidence to support this line of argument.
This theory however, is not without its flaws. Firstly, Khruschev, most often named as the first of these traitors to socialism, appears an unlikely candidate for this accusation. Being the son of a miner, he had working class origins, and had fought for the Bolsheviks in the 1917-20 civil war, when its outcome was still far from clear. It would seem sensible to assume that if he had been anti-socialist, he would have opposed rather than supported the Red Army. In World War 2, he also played a key role in organising guerrilla warfare defences of the Ukraine, once again supporting the Soviet Union.
There is also evidence to suggest that Khruschev acted only in what he saw was the best way to further socialism in the Soviet Union. He argues that prior to 1936, the policies implemented had been correct, and a good socialist base had been established. He intended to build upon this by creating ‘socialist legality’, through the reorganisation of state security and the re-establishment of the party as the dominant state organisation.13 In many ways, he did very little different that what had been done before in emphasising a commitment to the party and utilising people as the soviets key resource. Set against this background, it does seem unfair to criticise Khruschev as being a socialist traitor, and, as with the predetermination theory, I feel it is very difficult to suggest that the traitors theory is a serious reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Another theory that stems from the end of the Stalinist era is one of a general loosening of controls by the government of the Soviet Union. The death of Stalin brought with it the end of large scale political terror, with continuing reductions in the power and influence of the political police, the NKVD, by now renamed the MVD who were split into separate organisations, such as the KGB to reduce its power. Debate was increasingly tolerated on ‘specialist issues’, such as economic reform, especially under Khruschev and lasting through to the early part of Brezhnevs chairmanship. Freedom was especially great in the area of art and literature. By 1956, the roots of Soviet dissent were forming.14
This open debating of specialist issues gradually widened, as it became apparent that it was to be tolerated rather than totally repressed, as under Stalin. While in a Western democracy, this liberal toleration of ideas would be seen as an essential part of the governing process, for the Soviet system it was damaging. The very heart of Soviet planning was based upon the unquestioning obedience and compliance of the people.15 As the means of coercion were lessened, and increasing scope for debate permitted, it is possible to suggest that the CPSU was gradually loosing control of its population. A basically totalitarian state cannot afford to have dissident opinions if it is to function. The liberalisation of controls could therefore be regarded as an underlying factor in the collapse of the Soviet system.
Related to this loosening of controls came an increase in corruption, which spread from initial small scale bribes in the early years, to corruption that involved the highest levels of the CPSU. By the 1970's, ‘feudal baronies’ were being established in the Urals and Uzbekistan, and rumoured conspiracies involving Brezhnev’s daughter in theft and bribery.16 The corruption became endemic to the Soviet Union, further reducing its economic efficiency and damaging the credibility of its leadership. It could be said that after the death of Stalin, corruption increasingly ate away at the effectiveness off the administrative-command system of control so central to the idea of the Soviet system. With its decay, it is possible to argue that it was only a matter of time before the system would collapse.
American foreign policy could have been considered to contribute to the collapse of the Soviet system. The main evidence of this once again links back to the economic shortcomings of the Soviet system. After 1945, when relations between the USA and the USSR cooled to such an extent that the Cold War developed, both nations worked to ensure neither side developed a military advantage over the other. By the 1980’s the increasing stagnation of the Soviet economy was forcing them to spend a higher proportion of their GNP on armaments in order to not be outpaced by the western powers. The CIA estimated that by the mid 1980’s, Soviet spending on military projects had risen up to 15% of Soviet GNP, with more spent on civilian projects with military applications, such as space research.17 In the same period, US spending on defence registered about 7.9% of GNP.18 The Soviet economy was increasingly unable to cope. As more resources were taken by the military, areas such as capital investment lost out. As this period also saw the need for intensive economic development, utilising extra capital to maintain growth, the Soviet fixation with military spending created further economic problems, driving down the standard of living and increasing unemployment and poverty.
As these were problems that socialism was meant to tackle, increasingly the effectiveness and legitimacy of the CPSU was brought into question. In the long run, this would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet system.
The effects of Gorbachev
By the time Gorbachev became General Secretary of the CPSU in March 1985, the Soviet Union was facing many serious problems. There was a serious slowdown in economic growth, and a need for large-scale capital investment in industry. Social problems, including poverty, alcoholism and corruption were rife. In the political arena, there was a long standing lack of focus and a lack of new initiatives. In foreign affairs, the Soviet military was struggling in Afghanistan.19 When examining Gorbachev’s reforms, the main question is did his actions hasten the collapse of the Soviet system, or would the system have collapsed anyway from the aforementioned problems inherited from his predecessors?
It could be said that the central aim of Gorbachev’s chairmanship was to modernise the Soviet Union, and enable it to close the gap that had opened up between it and the capitalist west in terms of living standards and economic growth. Gorbachev espoused three general ideas in order to achieve this: perestroika, glasnost and uskorenie.20 The latter of these, meaning acceleration was introduced in 1985, but then gradually abandoned over the next 3 years, as it became increasingly unsuccessful. By all accounts, it was the traditional Soviet approach to improving economic performance, encouraging harder work, attempts to cut out corruption and raise productivity. However, after 3 years of growth averaging only 3.7%,21 the policy became politically untenable and increasingly contradicted his ideas on market liberalisation.
This highlights two key points in relation to the Soviet collapse. Firstly, the fact that the tried and tested method failed to provide tangible results suggests that the Soviet economy may have reached some sort of plateau. Prior to the 1980’s the soviet administrative-command style of economy had provided continuous growth in the region of 6%, mainly based upon the exploitation of the nations’ labour supply, which had been both cheap and plentiful. In the 1980’s, it was becoming apparent that this type of growth was exhausted. Unfortunately, the sustained economic growth was one of the reasons that support existed for the communist party. Without it, it was in reality only a question of time before the people would look for changes to be made. It became apparent that capital investment and technological process, otherwise known as intensive development, was needed to ensure continued economic growth.
However, the system failed to provide any adequate incentives for harder work or technical innovation that were so badly needed.22 Here the problem lay for the Soviet government. To get the growth needed, a major overhaul of the system was necessary, especially, as Bunce highlights, a movement from planning to markets, from public to private ownership, from shadow to real prices and to participation in the global economy.23 In other words, a further step away from the ideology of socialism; an ideology that gave legitimacy to the CPSU as the rightful holders of power, and leaders of the Soviet Union. With hindsight, it is possible to suggest that in admitting that the traditional socialist models weren’t working, and moving away from central planning, Gorbachev weakened the CPSU as a legitimate political entity.
Taken on its own, it would seem that the abandonment of traditional Soviet ideology was a severe blow to the Soviet system. More crucially however, is what it was replaced by, namely glasnost and perestroika. Glasnost was an umbrella term that encompassed the democratic reforms initiated by Gorbachev. Translated as openness, with implications of freer speech, a more open style of government along with a greater freedom of information, it was though of as the ideal way to generate new ideas, and was perceived as an essential attribute of society by the General Secretary.24
Under glasnost, the CPSU renounced its powers of censorship for the first time in its history. Even under Khruschev and the media liberalisation discussed earlier, all discussion had been closely monitored and regulated by the state. There were still clearly defined and well-enforced boundaries as to what was acceptable and what was not. Under Gorbachev, the media became one of the most unregulated in the world, and until the Press law in 1990 which limited its freedom in-line with those laws of most other nations, it could basically report as it pleased.25 With political debate now officially sanctioned, and the government being openly criticised and often unable to effectively defend itself, its legitimacy and role was increasingly called into question.
It is clear that in this particular area Gorbachev had miscalculated. There is little evidence to suggest that the media liberalisation was intended to do anything more than find a way to reform and update the existing Soviet system, rather than provide a platform from which it could be challenged. This seems to be more a disastrous unintended consequence, but still must be considered a reason for the systems collapse. Without this reform, it is difficult to see how any type of opposition could have formed so quickly to bring the system down.
I also believe that Gorbachevs’ economic reforms are central the Soviet collapse. One idea increasingly pursued was that limited market systems would need to play a part in the successful perestroika, or restructuring, of the economy. If it is accepted that the view expressed earlier, that there are inherent flaws within a centrally planned economy, it seems ironic to accuse Gorbachev of destroying to Soviet system by attempting to change them. There are two reasons, however, why this can indeed be done.
Firstly, it should be remembered that the Soviet system was built from an ideology; that of Marxism. Marxist ideology is very prescriptive about the ways that the ideal of communism can be achieved, one key element being government control of the factors of production. In acknowledging that this had failed, and more importantly that he was to resort to the market to attempt to repair the economy, he effectively admitted the failure of the CPSU to progress society towards communism. Moreover, he also appeared to abandon the party’s efforts in this direction; the entire basis for the legitimacy of its power. In the atmosphere free speech he had created, it was impossible to suppress calls for change and more outspoken public criticism of the regime.
Secondly, there were inherent flaws with the way he attempted to introduce the market. A market is a delicate system, and needs the right conditions to support it. “Independent courts, a clean civil service and police force, a vigorous legislature or proper regulatory bodies”26 were all lacking in the Soviet Union. Without them, any form of market economy had no realistic chance of surviving or prospering. The corruption, discussed before, had grown to such proportions that Soros commented “The command economy was too diseased to nurture the embryo of a market economy.”27
It would seem that while Gorbachev was right to attempt pro-market reforms, it was not done carefully enough, or the country made ready for such a transition. The failure of both forms of economic management in the Soviet Union would suggest that what was needed was more fundamental reform. Gorbachevs' failure at economic reform could arguably have meant that political reform was inevitable.
In desperation, proposals were made in 1988 to introduce some further elements of democracy into the Soviet system. A Congress of Peoples Deputies was to be created, with 2/3 members elected by universal suffrage in competitive (although not multi-party) elections. This body would appoint a Supreme Soviet to act as a legislature. It was, uniquely in Soviet history, an attempt to introduce electoral accountability to the system, although it was never intended to have decision making power. It was intended to be just another method of introducing fresh ideas into the existing framework.
The measure had far greater effects than this, however. Firstly, it cast further doubt over the legitimacy of the CPSU and its right to speak for the people. In the election, held in 1989, 38 party secretaries and a politburo member lost their seats. The result was the first official sign that the party was loosing its grip on the country. Perhaps more importantly it dispelled the idea that the CPSU alone spoke for the working classes, a key part of their ideology. It would be difficult to see how the CPSU could retain its monopoly of power after such a public display of rejection.
In later elections, although political parties were still banned, unofficial groupings of like-minded politicians became identifiable, and with censorship no longer within the communists power, there was little that could be done. This proved especially important in elections to the regional parliaments in 1990, when a popular choice was to vote for candidates taking a nationalist stance. Indeed, so great was support for the nationalists that they dominated in Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltic States. Another of the key ideals of the CPSU, the centralised state, was threatened and ultimately destroyed by the dispersal of power to the republics, and by 1991, the outright independence of many of these new states.
Gorbachev’s efforts to introduce democracy into the system were not, I believe, a key reason why the Soviet system collapsed, merely the method by which it did. The CPSU had already lost much of whatever legitimacy it ever possessed, and was clearly unable to cope with the problems the Soviet Union faced by the late 1980’s. Even without elections, I feel that the CPSU would have been unlikely to survive much longer as the holder of the monopoly of power. If the electoral mechanism did not remove it, violent revolution may ultimately have done.
Arguably he was left with little choice but to act as he did, given the desperate problems facing the country and the seeming inability of the CPSU to resolve them. The question about Gorbachev, however, centres on the issue of whether his reforms contributed to the systems collapse, or if the demise was inevitable anyway. Examined from this angle, I am inclined to agree with writers such as McNeill who argue that Gorbachev’s polices undoubtedly hastened the process of collapse.28 This is not to say that the Soviet system would have survived indefinitely, were it not for Gorbachev’s policies. Evidence suggests that it may have lasted another 20 years, but in the long term, I believe there was very little that could have been done to preserve the system in any recognisable form by this stage.
Conclusion
Of course it is impossible to say with any certainty why the Soviet Union collapsed politically. There are an infinite amount of theories, all which carry different views on the main reasons for its demise. Of these, only a few have been considered in this essay. Many more, including temporal social change and ideological decay can be argued to be contributing elements. There is no one simple overriding reason why the one party authoritarian rule of the CPSU came to an end in 1991. Its disintegration is clearly a combination of many different factors, some stemming from the very theoretical basis upon which the party was constructed, others developing more gradually throughout its history. What is clear that problems were not resolved as they arose, but left to grow and develop until they became insurmountable by the 1990s.
I personally believe that the key reason why the Soviet system collapsed was probably economic. Right from the outset there were doubts over the ability of a centrally planned socialist economy to function properly, even though this was brought into question in the 1950s and 60s. Even were it not for the possibility that there was no chance the economy could function, there is evidence to suggest it was mismanaged.
The communist party had promised economic growth, an end to poverty and employment for all. What it produced was an unsustainable level of spending on defence, industry with low productivity levels and an economy rife with corruption and mismanagement. Market reforms were instituted too late to be effective; the system had already disintegrated to such a point where a market could not function effectively. Without a properly functioning economic system, it would, in reality, be nearly impossible for any political system to survive.
It should be remembered though that it was not just economic problems that caused the Soviet system to collapse. For an administrative-command system to function, the people’s unquestioning loyalty and obedience is required. Dissenting opinions cannot be tolerated. Up until the death of Stalin in 1953, this was indeed the case, and few argue that the Soviet system ever looked likely to collapse under his dictatorial style of leadership. After 1953, however, we do see a clear move towards greater freedom of speech, beginning under Khruschev and cumulating in Gorbachev's abandonment of censorship. When also taken in context with the move away from political terror, by 1991 the CPSU had surrendered its powers to control the Soviet people. Without the means of coercion, a dictatorial regime that looses the support of its people and control of its economy will not last, as the case of the Soviet Union demonstrates.
