Reform, Coup and Collapse: The End of the Soviet State

Page 1 of 6

• 1. Setting the scene
• 2. Transformations begin
• 3. Changes in policy
• 4. Empire disintegrates
• 5. End of the Union
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

Setting the scene

The speed with which the Soviet system was transformed and the Soviet state disintegrated took almost everyone by surprise. The system appeared impervious to fundamental change during the years Leonid Brezhnev headed the Politburo (1964-82). And even the most disaffected nationalities in the Soviet Union - a description that fitted the Baltic peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - did not in their wildest dreams believe, when Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, that within less than seven years they would be living in independent states.

The dramatic events that followed the change of leadership in 1985, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991, had longer-term sources, but these did not determine the form or the timing of the system's transformation. Russia, which occupied three-quarters of the territory of the former Soviet Union, was a different society on the eve of Chernenko's death from what it had been at the time of Joseph Stalin's death just 32 years earlier. In the meanwhile the general level of education had risen, millions more people had entered higher education, and there was greater (though still restricted) knowledge of the outside world. Well-educated professionals had become a significant social group and they were ready to embrace the cultural liberalisation introduced early in the Gorbachev era.

'Well-educated professionals had become a significant social group and they were ready to embrace the cultural liberalisation introduced early in the Gorbachev era.'

As well as the pull of social change there was the push of policy failure. The rate of economic growth in the Soviet Union had been in long-term decline from the 1950s to the early 1980s. There was lower life expectancy, especially among adult males (linked by many observers to excessive alcohol consumption), and higher infant mortality rates. Yet such factors do not on their own explain the systemic change of the second half of the 1980s or the collapse of the Soviet state. Many an inefficient state has been able to muddle through or 'muddle down' over decades. Indeed, on these particular socio-economic indicators, post-Soviet Russia has a worse record than the late Soviet period.

Next 

Published: 2001-10-12