What was the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Question

What was the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Answer 1

There are a whole host of reasons. The four most important ones in my opinion were:

Defence spending. The US was spending about 13 to 15% on defence. The Soviet Union up to 35%. This created problems across industry, as plant wasn't replace, merely repaired, leading to inefficiencies.

This also exacerbated the lack of consumer goods - Soviet industry had always favoured Heavy Industry.

Agricultural failures - a series of bad harvests had led to the USSR having to import grain from the US.

The war in Afghanistan was turning into a meat grinder -sucking in men and materiel for no material gain - and it lost them international influence & prestige.

Space Defense Initiative - SDI. This USSR had to compete, and it was costing billions of Roubles - again bleeding the economy white.

Further to that: televisions became popular in the 1970s - this meant that people could now see the gulf between the West and the USSR and that it was growing, not contracting as official ideology stated it must do.

Sources: Stalinism and After; Alec Nove. Post-Communism, Leslie Holmes  Understanding Russian Politics Stephen White et al. and.   Russian Politics & Society, RIchard Sakwa

Answer 2

the official reason is the change in policy and leaving communism but the us was behind it for sure

Answer 3

Basically, they ran out of money trying to keep up with the US in everything from the space race to the arms race.

Answer 4

a FEW of the many reasons.. keeping away from talking about the huge effort to destroy it by capitalists.

- it turned into a state capitalist NOT communist country.

- it would be hard like a handful of countries to survive as communists unless they could produce all resources on their own without having to rely on other countries (capitalist countries).

- also when any revolution is purely pushed and later controlled by a handful of idealistic intellectuals rather than the working class than it is bound to fail.

- blah blah blah... a million more reasons.  

Answer 5

Basically their economy collapsed under the weight of miltary spending just as is happening to the USA now

Answer 6

the reason is, is that the soviet union has Communism:

which is like u basically have no free rights(look up further on wikipedia.)

and the way we live in USA is we have a capialist society

Answer 7

What nobody wants to say is that Jimmy Carter's

Human Rights" speech caused the first crack in the Iron Curtain.  When his ideas were laid out, they were so simple and humane that even the Soviets could not disagree, and so began the fall of the Soviets.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan also hastened the demise of the USSR.  The Soviets did not want to allow a fundamentalist Islamic regime on their southern border, so they invaded to prevent the Taliban from taking over.  The disastrous result is often compared to the US in Vietnam, or today, of course, the US in Iraq.  

Answer 8

1. Ronald Reagan introduced Star Wars and other beefed up military programs that made the cost of competition militarily too expensive for the Soviet Uniion. Along with Margaret Thatcher of Britain, the West had strong conservative leaders pushing hard for the SU to change.

2. Solidarity union in Poland demanded more rights. The breakup of the SU began in Poland. Reagan and Pope J-P II were the two greatest WESTERN reasons for the collapse of the SU.

3. Pope John Paul II, being Polish, lent his support to Poland and the movement there for human rights. Important: Poland was a very Catholic country and the Polish Pope was very important to that country.

4. Gorbachev, premier of the SU, was more amenable to change than previous leaders. He introduced Glasnost. Change came step by step at first till the final collapse, as best epitomized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.

5. The Soviet economy was always weaker than official statistics indicated. The Soviet Union was, economically, a house of cards that came crashing down due to inherent weaknesses in its economic system.