The path toward the breakdown of the USSR really began under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev. After the Czechoslovakian leader Alexander Dubcek introduced a policy of liberalization in 1968 Brezhnev responded to what he saw as a corruption of Soviet ideology by launching what became known as the “Brezhnev Doctrine” which essentially legitimated Soviet invasion of its European satellite allies to maintain the Communist principle. The Soviet Union was almost destined to collapse due to the economic stagnation that began during the Brezhnev era due in large part to its overextension on an agricultural industry that simply had not managed to fully recover from the days of collectivization and which was further undermined by its attempts to keep pace in the arms race with the US. While China also experienced many of these same problems, what ultimately may have been the deciding factor in Russia’s collapse while China has prospered was the ill-fated decision to walk into the trap set by the US to force the invasion of Afghanistan.
The death of Leonid Brezhnev, who had ruled the Soviet Union for nearly twenty years, and whose administration was notable mostly for its corruption, inaugurated a period of destability within the country that played a tremendous part in the coming collapse. Supporters of Pres. Ronald Reagan like to give the lion’s share of credit for the collapse of the Iron Curtain to his iron willed determination to end what he termed the evil empire. Forgotten in the rush to extend Reagan all the credit is that unlike any other American leader he was fortunate enough to deal with a country led by no less than three different leaders over the course of just a few years. The political in-fighting and economic uncertainty created a situation that was ripe for reform. Mikhail Gorbachev could probably never have risen to power at any other time in Soviet history and had Andropov or Chernenko been younger while still holding the same ideological views, the world may quite possibly be a much different place today. Although a similar situation took place in China following the death of Mao, the Chinese responded assertively and were able to avoid the destability caused by a number of leadership turnovers in such a short time. Even the threat from the Gang of Four was handled quickly and efficiently with extreme prejudice.
Gorbachev faced an economic crisis marked by no possibility for innovation and a history of wasted resources. This situation was exacerbated by low wages, and the Soviet Union lagged far behind other equally industrialized nations in the ability to quickly and efficiently introduce new practices or ideas. Perhaps the worst problem facing the Soviet economic system however was a stifling inflexibility that permeated every aspect of the economic system. The Chinese faced many of the same challenges in reforming their system in the 1970s, but attacked the problem of flexibility by taking on a much more pragmatic reform policy that relied on a much more entrepreneurial system than the bureaucratic system attempted by the Soviet Union.
To combat these problems Gorbachev introduced two reform policies, Glasnost and Perestroika. Perestroika was Gorbachev’s economic reform policy which was based on attempting to reconstruct the stagnation caused by the corruption during the Brezhnev years. Typical of the Perestroika reform was the introduction of a new law on state enterprise. The effect of this law was to allow companies to determine their own output based upon the demand for the goods they produced. In addition, Gorbachev mandated that the government would no longer bail companies out of bankruptcy. Perhaps the most striking move made by Gorbachev was to allow private enterprise, something that had not taken place in Russia since the New Economic Policy of Lenin. China, ironically, may have benefited from a lack of such audacious vision. The Chinese reform policy, recognizing the inherent difficulties in shifting from such a large ingrained socialist system to a more flexible one would involved a tremendous risk, chose a path of gradual change that was reliant on the concept of trial and error, of incremental movements built on top of small successes.
The stated intent of Glasnost was to be a policy of openness and freedom such has not been seen in the Soviet Union since the earliest days following the Revolution. The real intent of Glasnost, however, was to open the arena of debate on economic reform while also increasing the difficulty for the more conservative members of the Communist Party to criticize the reformist policies. What may have been an unintended consequence of Glasnost was that the new openness also allowed many of the simmering tensions that had been bubbling unspoken beneath the surface of Soviet society to be brought into the open. The loosening of free speech laws engendered a new bravery among the people; those who had been terrified to speak out due to fears of retribution were no longer so cowed and as a result stories of institutionalized injustices became public knowledge. Freedom of speech can be a dangerous thing for a government, especially when most people have no memory of it ever existing. The new freedoms spread like wildfire through the Soviet Union and served to fundamentally weaken the previously rigid authority of the government. The new freedom to criticize also included criticism of Russia’s Vietnam war: the invasion of Afghanistan.
China, obviously, chose not to face this threat and is the better for it, at least from the point of view of the leadership. The primary difference between the reform that took place in the Soviet Union and the reform that took place in China was that while a certain Chinese-style Perestroika existed, there was clearly nothing analogous to Glasnost. The idea of the openness and freedoms experienced under Gorbachev was desperately hoped for by the Chinese citizens. Watching the Soviet satellites fall one by one to uprisings engendered by the new freedoms led to Chinese dissidents to attempt the same thing. The result, of course, was the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre. The brutal violence that took place in June of 1989 probably stands as the sharpest line of division between why the Soviet Union collapsed in that turbulent year of 1989 and why China is now the only real communist superpower left.
Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan was orchestrated by the political maneuvering within the Carter administration. The US had long hoped to somehow draw the Soviet Union into a Vietnam-style quagmire that would be a drain on both human and economic resources and they were successful in Afghanistan. Just as the US today is learning that a well-funded militia can prolong a war against a country without an army indefinitely, so did the Soviet Union. Opposition to what was seen as a hopeless cause, combined with the drain on resources may well be considered the nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
Perestroika simply could not be successful unless Gorbachev could somehow change the entire Soviet economic infrastructure. The problem was that the infrastructure was becoming hopelessly untenable as a result of the openness of Glasnost. For the system to work, people would have to willingly believe in the communist system instead of being forced to believe in it. Economic reformation of a broken system is never easy, but the longer it takes and the harder it becomes on people, the more difficult it is convince them to go along. Eventually Perestroika failed-and the Soviet Union collapsed-because the people lost support for it and with Glasnost in place their failure to support it was no longer able to control with force.
It most certainly was not Ronald Reagan who was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The crackdown in Tiananmen Square stands as proof that it was not just the failure of Perestroika that brought about the end of the Soviet Union, it was the success of Glasnost. Had an analogous form of Glasnost been in place, the Chinese might have been forced to follow the path of Eastern Europe.
