9.7 - The Fall of Communism

Economic Troubles in the Soviet Union

• Leonid Brezhnev rose to power in the Soviet Union and was focused on maintaining the status quo.

• He took power in 1964, after Khrushchev was removed, and led the Soviet Union until his death in 1982. He kept jobs secure for party officials, spent heavily on the military, and avoided risky reforms.

• Brezhnev believed that the Soviet Union was functioning well, but economic realities in the late 1960s and 1970s contradicted this view.

• The Soviet Union operated under a planned economy, where the government made all decisions about jobs, production, and distribution.

• In contrast to a market economy, where consumer demand drives production, a planned economy relies on centralized decisions, which can lead to inefficiencies.

• By the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet bureaucracy, which was responsible for implementing the planned economy, became plagued by inefficiency and waste.

• This inefficiency led to a decline in worker productivity, contributing to the overall economic troubles.

• In a planned economy, there was little incentive for workers to exceed basic expectations or innovate, as the benefits of increased productivity were shared collectively.

• This lack of personal reward discouraged hard work and innovation, further weakening the Soviet economy.

• The Soviet Union faced significant agricultural challenges due to its cold climate and large areas of land unsuitable for farming.

• Crop failures were common, and in 1972 a severe drought ruined much of the Soviet harvest.

• The Soviet government could not grow enough grain to feed its people and its livestock, so it had to look abroad.

• To address the food shortage, the Soviet Union turned to an unexpected source: the United States, its chief rival in the Cold War.

• The U.S. agreed to sell the Soviet Union $750 million worth of grain on credit over three years.

• However, the situation in the Soviet Union was so dire that they spent the entire $750 million in just one month.

• Heavy military spending to keep up with the U.S. (especially during President Ronald Reagan's arms buildup in the 1980s) and the war in Afghanistan (1979 to 1989, see 9.3) drained money from the economy.

• When world oil prices crashed in the mid-1980s, the Soviets lost much of the income they earned by selling oil and gas abroad.

• By the late 1970s, the Soviet economy had nearly stopped growing (a period later called the Era of Stagnation). Shortages and long lines for food and consumer goods were common, and the gap with the West kept widening. These economic troubles would continue to plague the Soviet Union, contributing to its eventual collapse.

Gorbachev's Reforms and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

• After Brezhnev died in 1982, two elderly leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, each died after a short time in office. In March 1985, the party chose Mikhail Gorbachev, who at 54 was much younger than the old leadership.

• Unlike Brezhnev, who was focused on maintaining the status quo, Gorbachev was a serious reformer, determined to address the deepening crises within the Soviet Union.

• Perestroika, meaning "restructuring," was Gorbachev's initiative to reform the Soviet economy by introducing elements of the free market.

• Key aspects of perestroika included:
• Letting state factories make more of their own decisions and keep some of their profits (the 1987 Law on State Enterprise).
• Allowing for more private property and individual economic activity.
• For example, from 1987 foreign companies could form joint ventures with Soviet firms, and from 1988 people could open small private businesses called cooperatives.

• But the reforms only half-replaced central planning. They broke up the old system of orders and supplies without creating a working market, and most prices were still set by the state.

• As a result, shortages got worse, the government ran large budget deficits, and by 1990 the Soviet economy was shrinking, showing the limits of the perestroika reforms.

• Glasnost, meaning "openness," was Gorbachev's policy aimed at increasing transparency and encouraging free expression within the Soviet Union.

• Under glasnost, several significant changes were introduced:
• People were allowed to speak openly about the problems facing the Soviet Union, a major shift after decades of repression.
• More than one candidate was permitted to compete for political office, and political parties other than the Communist Party were legalized.
• These changes came in 1989, when Soviet voters chose a new parliament (the Congress of People's Deputies) in the first Soviet elections with real choices between candidates, and in 1990, when the Communist Party gave up its legal monopoly on power.
• Political prisoners, who had been jailed for criticizing the party or state, were released.
• For example, the physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow from internal exile in 1986, and newspapers began publishing the truth about Stalin's crimes.

• The Chernobyl disaster in April 1986, when a nuclear reactor in Soviet Ukraine exploded and released massive amounts of radiation, tested glasnost.
• At first, the government kept the disaster quiet. Sweden detected the radiation two days later, and Gorbachev did not speak about it on television for almost three weeks. The cover-up embarrassed the leadership and pushed Gorbachev to expand glasnost, and the disaster became a symbol of the Soviet system's dishonesty.

• Gorbachev's reforms, while intended to strengthen the Soviet Union, ultimately contributed to its collapse.

• Perestroika and glasnost exposed the deep flaws within the Soviet system, leading to increased demands for change and independence among Soviet republics.

• The combination of economic struggles and the newfound openness created an environment in which the Soviet Union could no longer maintain its grip on power.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

• While Gorbachev's reforms of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) aimed to revitalize the Soviet Union, they inadvertently led to its collapse.

• Under previous authoritarian rulers, ethnic tensions within the Soviet Union were suppressed. However, the introduction of even limited freedoms allowed these tensions to resurface dramatically.

• As openness increased, many ethnic minorities began protesting the discrimination they had experienced under Soviet rule, leading to violent conflicts in some cases.

• For example, Armenians and Azerbaijanis began fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988, and in April 1989 Soviet troops killed protesters in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi.

• The newfound freedom to express long-suppressed desires led to a wave of nationalism across the Soviet Union, particularly in regions like Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as in the Soviet Bloc states.

• The Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) led the way. In August 1989, about 2 million people there formed a human chain (the Baltic Way) to protest Soviet rule, and in March 1990 Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence.

• Gorbachev made a significant break from his predecessors in 1989 by announcing that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene militarily in the Soviet Bloc to support Communist governments.

• Each country could now choose its own path, which ended the Brezhnev Doctrine (see 9.4). A Soviet spokesman jokingly called the new policy the "Sinatra Doctrine," after the song "My Way."

• This announcement triggered immediate revolts in Eastern Europe, leading to the rapid unraveling of Soviet control in the region.

• Poland (1989 Elections):
• Poland had long resisted Communist rule. In 1980, shipyard workers in Gdańsk, led by electrician Lech Wałęsa, formed Solidarity, the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc, which grew to about 10 million members. Inspired in part by the Polish Pope John Paul II, it demanded workers' rights and more freedom. In December 1981, the government declared martial law, banned Solidarity, and jailed its leaders, but the union survived underground.
• In 1989, with strikes and an economic crisis spreading, Poland's Communist government (not the Soviet Union) held Round Table talks with Solidarity. It agreed to legalize Solidarity and hold partly free elections: all seats in a new Senate and about a third of the seats in the main house (the Sejm) were open, and the rest were reserved for the Communists and their allies, who expected to stay in control.
• In June 1989, Solidarity won almost every seat it was allowed to compete for (including 99 of the 100 Senate seats). In August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc in over 40 years, and Gorbachev did not interfere. This showed the rest of Eastern Europe that change was possible.

• Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989):
• The Berlin Wall, built by East Germany's Communist government with Soviet approval in 1961 to stop East Germans from fleeing to the democratic West, became a potent symbol of Communist oppression.
• In 1989, Hungary opened its border with Austria, and thousands of East Germans escaped through it to the West. At home, huge peaceful protests (like the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig) forced out longtime leader Erich Honecker in October. On November 9, 1989, after an East German official mistakenly announced that the border was open immediately, crowds rushed the checkpoints, the guards let them through, and Berliners began tearing down the wall.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the crumbling of Soviet power and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.

• Revolutions of 1989:
• Czechoslovakia: In November 1989, mass peaceful protests (the Velvet Revolution) brought down the Communist government, and dissident playwright Václav Havel became president.
• Hungary and Bulgaria: Communist leaders gave up power through negotiations and agreed to free elections, held in 1990.
• Romania: The one violent revolution. Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered troops to fire on protesters, but the army switched sides, and he and his wife were executed on December 25, 1989.

• All these factors, along with numerous complementary ones, culminated in the official collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

• The end came quickly. Communist hard-liners tried to stop the breakup with a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, but crowds in Moscow led by Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of Russia, resisted, and the coup collapsed in three days. The republics then declared independence one after another. In December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the Soviet Union finished, Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet Union split into 15 independent countries.

• The collapse marked the end of the Cold War and led to the establishment of capitalist economies and democratic governments across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc.

• Many countries switched to market economies through "shock therapy" (lifting price controls and selling state companies almost overnight, as in Poland in 1990 and Russia in 1992). The switch brought new freedoms and, in time, growth in countries like Poland, but at first it also caused inflation, unemployment, and falling living standards.

• Key outcomes included the reunification of Germany, the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the breakup of Yugoslavia into several ethnically defined states.

• Germany was reunited on October 3, 1990, under West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Czechoslovakia split on January 1, 1993 (the "Velvet Divorce"), while Yugoslavia broke apart in war (see 9.5).

• The European Union also expanded as many new nations from Eastern Europe joined.

• Eight former Communist countries joined the EU in 2004 (including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the three Baltic states), Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013. Many of them also joined NATO (see 9.4 and 9.10).