The Modern History

Who Killed the Soviet Union? | Opinion | The Moscow Times

Why were Russia’s lawmakers and citizens —not to mention the KGB and military — so indifferent to this destructive and fateful adventurism of Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich?

Some of the answers to these questions can be found in the following:

• The Soviet planned economy had almost completely come to a halt;
• The monopoly of Marxist-Leninist ideology left Soviet society in a spiritual and political vacuum that intensified the search for alternatives; 
• The people’s desire for basic consumer goods — and the Kremlin’s inability to recognize the importance of this elementary desire — led to the emergence of a pervasive shadow economy that was incompatible with the principles of socialism;
• The weakening of the ideological underpinnings of society coupled with the nearly lifeless condition of religion in Russia led to increased interethnic tensions; 
• The state campaign against alcohol and the drop in world oil prices drained government coffers, sharply limiting maneuvering room in domestic policy for the Communist Party.

There were also man-made factors behind the Soviet Union’s growing internal crisis. They included the following:

• For decades, foreign states tried to destabilize the Soviet Union. They ultimately succeeded in establishing anti-socialist and anti-Soviet forces within society;
• The senior Communist Party leadership allowed control of the media to pass into the hands of “agents of influence” at a time when state counter-propaganda measures had become ineffective; 
• A number of activists advocating change joined forces to disrupt food supplies to Moscow and Leningrad, creating an artificially induced, widespread food shortage from 1989 to 1991.