Mention two reforms which president Gorbachev initiated in the USSR
Answers
Short Answer: There wasn’t anything that forced him to do anything, he and his goons crippled the economy on their own and their “glasnost” gave a voice to the scummy neo-nazis and other persuasive but lying scum that had previously been looked down upon in society.
Long Answer:
Nothing forced him to do anything, the stagnation of the time was easily solved through measures OPPOSITE to those that Gorbachev initiated. Gorbachev, regardless of what he may claim now, was looking to dismantle the USSR and make good money doing so, and he did.
John Gleissner’s assertions are outright false, Marxist-Leninism is not the same as Marxism, the state withering away is an over-simplification of Marx in any case and is basically a return to the “no true scotsman fallacy”
The soviet system in terms of efficiency was perfectly fine as it was, Gorbachev and his goons manipulated the data and silenced their opposition with their revisionism and forced the collapse by backing up the systems. The people were largely against it as shown in the Soviet referendum of 1991 and the subsequent shelling of Soviet officials by the Yeltsin government.
To give an understanding of how well off the Soviet Union was here:
CIA Study on the Soviet Economy
According to a CIA report, the Soviet economy
“grew at an average annual rate of 4.6 percent from 1950 through 1981”, noting that “during the same period, U.S. GNP increased by 3.4% per year.”
What has happened, says the CIA, is that the rate of growth of the Soviet economy has slowed down to roughly two percent in the past three years. This drop in the rate of growth– largely due to four consecutive years of extremely unfavorable weather conditions which led to poor harvests – is what has been seized upon by some as evidence of Soviet socialism’s final downturn.
The report also notes that the Soviet economy is the second largest in the world and that its GNP quadrupled over the past 30 years, attaining an output valued at $ 1.6 trillion in 1982. Industrial output during this period went up 700 percent while the value of fixed capital – buildings, machinery, equipment, etc. – increased by 11 percent.
A basic strength of the Soviet economy, according to the CIA, is its ‘self-sufficiency’–important given the Reagan administration’s plan of waging economic warfare against the USSR
The report points out; the Soviet Union is richly endowed with an abundance of natural resources– enough coal for 200 years, iron ore reserves; 40 percent of the world’s total, one-fifth the world’s forest resources, and the world’s largest reserves of strategic and precious metals. And with a large and highly educated labor force–estimated at 147 million–the CIA asserts that