121 Write one of the reason . for the the collapse of the USSR
Answers
Gorbachev's decision to allow elections with a multi-party system and create a presidency for the Soviet Union began a slow process of democratization that eventually destabilized Communist control and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Answer:
On January 1, 1991, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering some 8,650,000 square miles (22,400,000 square km), nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface. Its population numbered more than 290 million, and 100 distinct nationalities lived within its borders. It also boasted an arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and its sphere of influence, exerted through such mechanisms as the Warsaw Pact, extended throughout eastern Europe. Within a year, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. While it is, for all practical purposes, impossible to pinpoint a single cause for an event as complex and far-reaching as the dissolution of a global superpower, a number of internal and external factors were certainly at play in the collapse of the U.S.S.R.
The political factor
When Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on March 11, 1985, his primary domestic goals were to jump-start the moribund Soviet economy and to streamline the cumbersome government bureaucracy. When his initial attempts at reform failed to yield significant results, he instituted the policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”). The former was intended to foster dialogue, while the latter introduced quasi free market policies to government-run industries. Rather than sparking a renaissance in Communist thought, glasnost opened the floodgates to criticism of the entire Soviet apparatus. The state lost control of both the media and the public sphere, and democratic reform movements gained steam throughout the Soviet bloc. Perestroika exhibited the worst of the capitalist and communist systems: price controls were lifted in some markets, but existing bureaucratic structures were left in place, meaning that Communist officials were able to push back against those policies that did not benefit them personally. In the end, Gorbachev’s reforms and his abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine hastened the demise of the Soviet empire. By the end of 1989 Hungary had dismantled its border fence with Austria, Solidarity had swept into power in Poland, the Baltic states were taking concrete steps toward independence, and the Berlin Wall had been toppled. The Iron Curtain had fallen, and the Soviet Union would not long outlast it.
The economic factor