Impact
- Ethnic unrest
- Economic inefficiency
- Historical atrocities
- Communist ideology, was eventually transformed into a totalitarian state, in which the Communist leadership had complete control over the country.
- Non-Russian ethnic groups in the country (which comprised more than fifty percent of the total population of the Soviet Union) would resist assimilation into a Russianized State.
- Russia was in the arms race and fighting many wars (Afghanistan), so their economy weakened.
- By 1985, the country was in deep economic and political problems
- Mikhail Gorbachev, upon assuming office, declared the Soviet economy to be in a "pre-crisis."
- By 1986, Gorbachev also began experimenting with the notion that greater democracy and freedom of speech, if presented in the proper format, would lead to increased socialism.
- This unleashed emotions and political feelings that had been pent up for decades, and which were extremely powerful when brought out into the open. Moreover, his policy of economic reform did not have the immediate results he had hoped for and had predicted. The Soviet people used their newly allotted freedom of speech to criticize Gorbachev for his failure to improve the economy.
- Massive demonstrations of the “August days” had demonstrated that the population would accept nothing less than democracy.
- Finally, the ideology of Communism, which the Soviet Government worked to instill in the hearts and minds of its population, never took firm root, and eventually lost whatever influence it had originally carried.
- Like dominoes, Eastern European communist dictatorships fell one by one.
- In February, 1990, the Communist Party agreed to relinquish its political monopoly.
- In June 1991, Gorbachev conceded power, realizing that he could no longer contain the power of the population. He allowed free elections to choose a president of the Russian Republic.
- In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 separate countries (US State Department).
Importance
- Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism.
- The breakup of the Soviet Union transformed the entire world political situation, leading to a complete reformulation of political, economic and military alliances all over the globe.