The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Leonid Brezhnev had led the Soviet Union since 1964. Under his rule, the economy stopped growing. State factories kept running but produced goods nobody wanted. Food shortages were common. Real innovation barely existed.

“The party had stopped governing. It had started merely surviving.”

The military was enormous and expensive. It consumed a huge share of the national budget — resources that did not reach ordinary people's homes, shops, or hospitals.

Most Soviet citizens quietly knew the system was failing them. They had heard Western radio broadcasts and seen smuggled foreign goods. The gap between what the government claimed and what people actually experienced had grown too wide to deny.

Three Soviet leaders had died in quick succession. Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko had each been old and unwell. The party had been choosing its leaders by seniority rather than ability, and the results had been disastrous.

“Gorbachev was not trying to end the Soviet Union. He was trying to save it.”

Gorbachev understood the economic problems and the cost of the arms race. He believed the system could be made more honest, more efficient, and better run without being dismantled entirely. He wanted to reform communism, not replace it.

He would discover that the system was more fragile than he understood. Once he began loosening controls and encouraging openness, forces he had not anticipated started to move — and they would prove impossible to manage.

The old system had the state controlling everything: what was produced, at what price, and in what quantities. Perestroika tried to loosen those controls, allowing enterprises limited freedoms and permitting small cooperatives to operate for the first time since the 1920s.

“The plan was to fix the economy. The effect was to break the routines that had kept it running.”

The partial reforms created chaos. Supply chains that had functioned under central direction began to break down. Managers did not know what the new rules required. Factories started raising wages rather than improving what they made.

Shops became emptier than before. The population grew frustrated. The visible failure of perestroika to improve living conditions made people doubt whether any reform of the Soviet system was actually possible.