Andropov’s anti-corruption campaign which he undertook shortly before he deposed Khruschev was targeted at the elite of the party that had lost the revolutionary fever and were now mainly concerned with their own material gain. Hamburg analyses that the struggle of the communist leaders after Khruschev was to re-install discipline in the party. After Khruschev’s death Andropov’s anti-corruption campaign saw a number of senior party members removed from their positions and replaced by a younger generation. Hamburg notes that the likes of this younger generation, Gorbachev being the main example, grew up under Khruschev’s reformist policy and were also well read unlike most previous soviet leaders. Gorbachev for example had a law degree and was therefore exposed to a lot of western theories and philosophies. One can say they were not pure Communists. The reform they tried to bring would result in the collapse of the USSR. Judt notes that power in an authoritarian state was indevisable and to try to was to contradict the policies that ran the state.
Gorbachev came with Perestroika and Glasnost, two policies that mainly lead to the final collapse of the USSR. The process of Glasnost in unveiling the hidden crimes of Stalin opened the risk of bringing up the question of legitimacy of the regime itself. Censorship was less sensored again and books were published severely denouncing Stalin. People were more exposed to Western culture and admired their standard of living and hence they yearned for change even more. Malia argues, “this loss of legitimacy of the regime itself would prove fatal to the system, for its surreal structures were such that they could not survive exposure to the truth.”
Perestroika was meant to reform and re-structure the Soviet economy, the problem was Gorbachev did it hesitantly not wanting to move away from Communist principles. The idea that the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party could be sustained while the party itself shed merely the pathological character it had obtained for seven decades of absolute power suggested a naïve political attitude on Gorbachev’s part. The abandonment of communist regimes in eastern Europe created a ripple which saw the states inside the soviet union also demanding independence from the USSR. Gorbachev sought to break down the command economy but did not also want to introduce a complete market economy, this contradiction resulted in the failure of Perestroika. An example worth noting of how Gorbachev’s reforms led to the collapse of the USSR is when at the 19th conference of the Party in 1988 Gorbachev agreed to hold contested elections for a new legislature thereby enabling Boris Yeltsin to make a comeback. Yeltsin was to later ban the Communist party in 1991.
However, there were issues that plagued the USSR that Communist leaders after Stalin had inherited and tried to solve but the final result was the collapse of the USSR. As a result of the cold war the capitalist states had set up an economic bloc against the USSR and in the 1970s the USSR was expelled from the IMF and World Bank. Hamburg notes that by the time Gorbachev came into power ‘the rot’ began to set in. The USSR’s economy began to decline slowly from the early days of the Cold War partly because of military overspending. The USSR spent 15 to 25% of its GNP whereas the Americans only spent 5 to 10%.
Urbanization was also a major contributor to the USSR’s collapse. Urbanization’s closely linked to my next point of nationalism. As the Soviet Union grew older its population and nationalities began to be educated and more self aware. Moshe Lewin argues that ‘the country went through a social revolution while Brezhnev slept.’ People were more skeptical of the system. They began to see the folly in the propagandist claim of the system of how the Socialist way of life was more superior because of exposure to western culture and the western way of doing things. The growing insufficiencies of an old planning system not designed for a modern economy meant that increasingly goods were at high demand yet short supply.
A direct result of Urbanization was a growing spirit of nationalism. Nationalities within the Soviet Union began to feel that they could govern themselves better if they were granted independence. An example of this is the Afghanistan case where a revolt broke up and the Soviet government tried to sustain a puppet regime in unfamiliar territory. This created even more opposition for the Soviet Union and the situation also inspired other nationalities to revolt. It’s worth to note that 50% of the Soviet Union’s population was not Russian and therefore did not feel as part of the USSR but felt as if they were ruled over by Russians.
In conclusion the Soviet leaders may be said to have brought upon themselves a collapse that was after all inevitable. They introduced policies they thought would help revive the Party’s lost morale. The reforms backfired or affected the party in the negative for example De-stalinization loosened the party’s control and influence. However the problems that plagued the USSR could not be solved without completely reforming the party,in other terms because of growing nationalism,urbanization and the bad state of the economy the USSR was bound to collapse nomatter what.
by
yungmarley (student)
