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.
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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.
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The economic factor
By some measures, the Soviet economy was the world’s second largest in 1990, but shortages of consumer goods were routine and hoarding was commonplace. It was estimated that the Soviet black market economy was the equivalent of more than 10 percent of the country’s official GDP. Economic stagnation had hobbled the country for years, and the perestroika reforms only served to exacerbate the problem. Wage hikes were supported by printing money, fueling an inflationary spiral. Mismanagement of fiscal policy made the country vulnerable to external factors, and a sharp drop in the price of oil sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the Soviet Union ranked as one of the world’s top producers of energy resources such as oil and natural gas, and exports of those commodities played a vital role in shoring up the world’s largest command economy. When oil plunged from $120 a barrel in 1980 to $24 a barrel in March 1986, this vital lifeline to external capital dried up. The price of oil temporarily spiked in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but by that point the collapse of the Soviet Union was well under way.
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The military factor
It is a widely held belief that Soviet defense spending accelerated dramatically in response to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and proposals such as the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, the Soviet military budget had been trending upward since at least the early 1970s, but Western analysts were left with best guesses in regard to hard numbers. Outside estimates of Soviet military spending ranged between 10 and 20 percent of GDP, and, even within the Soviet Union itself, it was difficult to produce an exact accounting because the military budget involved a variety of government ministries, each with its own competing interests. What can be said definitively, however, is that military spending was consistently agnostic of overall economic trends: even when the Soviet economy lagged, the military remained well-funded. In addition, the military took priority when it came to research and development talent. Technological innovators and would-be entrepreneurs who could have helped support Gorbachev’s partial transition to a market economy were instead funneled into defense industries.
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Afghanistan
In addition to budgetary matters, the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan (1979–89) was a key military factor in the breakup of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet army, lionized for its role in World War II and a vital tool in the repression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, had waded into a quagmire in a region known as the Graveyard of Empires. As many as a million Soviet troops participated in the 10-year occupation, and approximately 15,000 were killed and thousands more were wounded. More than a million Afghans—mostly civilians—were killed, and at least 4 million were externally displaced by the fighting. The army that had bested Hitler and crushed dissent during the Cold War found itself frustrated by mujahideen armed with American surface-to-air missiles. As long as the government controlled the press, dissent about the war in Afghanistan remained muted, but glasnost opened the door to the vocalization of widespread war weariness. The army, perhaps the single most powerful opponent of Gorbachev’s reform efforts, found itself back-footed by the stalemate in Afghanistan, and it lost whatever leverage it might have had in checking the advance of perestroika. In the Soviet republics, the Afgantsy (veterans of the Afghan conflict) agitated against what they perceived to be Moscow’s war. Many soldiers from the Central Asian republics felt closer ethnic and religious ties to Afghans than they did to Russians, and protests were widespread. In the European republics, the cleavage with Moscow was even more dramatic. Antiwar demonstrations broke out in Ukraine, while opposition forces in the Baltic republics viewed the war in Afghanistan through the lens of the Russian occupation of their own countries. This fueled the secessionist movements that proceeded, largely unchecked, to declarations of independence by all three Baltic states in 1990.
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The social factor
On January 31, 1990, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow. The image of the Golden Arches in Pushkin Square seemed like a triumph of Western capitalism, and customers lined up around the block for their first taste of a Big Mac. But such a display was not uncommon in the final years of the Soviet Union; Muscovites queued just as long for morning editions of liberal newspapers. Glasnost had, indeed, ushered in a flurry of new concepts, ideas, and experiences, and Soviet citizens were eager to explore them—whether that involved devouring essays about democratization from leading political philosophers or dipping a toe into a market economy via Western-style fast food. In 1984 Eduard Shevardnadze had told Gorbachev, “Everything is rotten. It has to be changed.” The feeling was not an uncommon one. The Soviet public was disgusted with the widespread corruption endemic to the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s goal with glasnost and perestroika was nothing less than a transformation of the Soviet spirit, a new compact between the Soviet regime and its people. Gorbachev’s chief adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, described the challenge facing them: “The main issue today is not only economy. This is only the material side of the process. The heart of the matter is in the political system…and its relation to man.” In the end, the tension between the newly empowered citizenry and a Soviet state with ruined credibility proved too much to overcome, and a last gasp coup attempt by Communist hardliners shattered the Soviet Union.
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The nuclear factor
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States teetered on the edge of mutual nuclear destruction. What few had considered, however, was that the Soviet Union would be brought down by an incident involving a civilian nuclear plant. Gorbachev had been in power for just over a year when, on April 26, 1986, the Unit 4 reactor at the Chernobyl power station in Pryp’yat (now in Ukraine) exploded. The explosion and subsequent fires released more than 400 times the amount of radioactive fallout as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. The official response to the disaster would be a test of Gorbachev’s doctrine of openness, and, in that regard, glasnost would be found fatally wanting. Communist Party officials acted quickly to suppress information about the severity of the disaster, going as far as to order that May Day parades and celebrations in the affected area should proceed as planned despite the known risk of radiation exposure. Western reports about the dangerously high levels of wind-transported radioactivity were dismissed as gossip, while apparatchiks quietly collected Geiger counters from science classrooms. Workers were finally able to bring the radiation leak under control on May 4, but Gorbachev did not issue an official statement to the public until May 14, 18 days after the disaster. He characterized the incident at Chernobyl as a “misfortune” and pilloried Western media coverage as a “highly immoral campaign” of “malicious lies.” Over time, Communist Party propaganda was increasingly at odds with the daily experiences of those in the contamination zone who were dealing with the physical effects of radiation poisoning. Whatever trust remained in the Soviet system had been shattered. Decades later, Gorbachev marked the anniversary of the disaster by stating, “even more than my launch of perestroika, [Chernobyl] was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”