Collapse of USSR
1 Reasons and catalysts
* USSR outspends itself in arms race
* Poor agriculture infrastructure, low farm productivity
* Cash starved USSR does not have money to feed its people
* No freedom of speech – hence frustrated populace
* Glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev hasten collapse
The Soviet regime’s proclaimed goal was to forge the classless, communist society that German political theorist Karl Marx had sketched in the 19th century. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) pledged in its 1961 program to attain fullfledged
communism within a generation. The target proved unrealizable. CPSU theory classified the Soviet Union as a socialist society in which three main groups—the working class (proletariat), peasantry, and white-collar intelligentsia—coexisted harmoniously and selflessly laid the foundations of the coming communist utopia. In reality, social structure was more complicated than the theory allowed, and the ruling party worried more about perpetuating its power and privileges than about advancing popular well-being or preparing for the future.Many personal freedoms were drastically curtailed in the Soviet Union. In the Stalin era, employees needed the permission of
management to change jobs and could face criminal prosecution for tardiness or absenteeism. These cruel penalties were abandoned in the 1950s; most other restrictions were not. Soviet citizens continued to be subject to surveillance and
interference by the political police. They could join only associations approved by the CPSU. They could not set up businesses or sell their individual services, save for a few minor fields such as tutoring and baby-sitting. State-imposed regulations on
personal mobility required residents to carry internal passports and to have them stamped by the police before changing locale; travel abroad was possible only with special authorization. Military service was compulsory and graduates from higher
education had to accept work assignments, sometimes in undesirable locations, the first few years after acquiring their diplomas. Able-bodied adults who did not hold a job were condemned as “social parasites”, and evicted from the big cities.
Average living conditions deteriorated between the 1917 revolution and Stalin’s death in 1953, depressed by social upheaval,warfare, and planners’ bias toward military and industrial spending. Progress at last came about under Khrushchev and
Brezhnev in boosting the supply of foodstuffs, consumer goods, and housing. Even at that, the standard of living lagged far behind the affluent West. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated Soviet national output in 1991 to be about
$9100 per capita, compared with $15,000 per capita in the United Kingdom and $21,800 in the United States. In the neglected consumer realm, Soviet backwardness was greater than overall figures might suggest. Some Western and Russian experts judged per capita purchasing power to be about one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. norm in the 1980s.
In the housing realm, for example, 15 percent of families lived in a single room in 1989 and 47 percent in two rooms. Waiting times for government-funded apartments, which rented for tiny sums once allocated, were ten or more years long in some
cities. Sixty-three percent of Soviet households did not have a telephone. Housing construction fell far short of demand after the mid-1970s, as only six or seven apartments were built for every ten new households formed. Home appliances and other
consumer durables were widespread, yet quality was shabby, assortment limited, and repair facilities scarce. Chronic shortages forced people to spend hours in line at state stores and to hoard items, thereby aggravating the shortages. Disparities between official and black-market prices bred corruption among sales personnel.
The regime’s egalitarian ideals often clashed with its desire to spur productivity and loyalty by differentiating the rewards people received. Inequality of income and social status was pervasive under Stalin and persevered afterward, despite efforts to
improve the lot of the poorest segments of the population. Average earnings of the best-paid 10 percent of the labor force were more than three times those of the worst-paid 10 percent in 1976. Members of the CPSU apparatus, senior economic
managers, and other favored groups enjoyed not only higher salaries but also more comfortable apartments, better recreational opportunities, access to luxury goods, and foreign travel.
Public services to some degree offset low incomes. A point of pride was the government’s free provision of health care,education, and social-security benefits. Even here, though, problems of quality, availability, and equity simmered beneath the
surface. Hospital treatment may have been without charge, but it was revealed in the 1980s that only every second hospital had an X-ray machine and only 20 percent of rural hospitals and clinics had hot running water. The sick often had to purchase
therapy and medication through illegal gratuities. The Soviet elite, by contrast, received superior medical care in secret facilities closed to the masses. Underfunding of welfare programs, growing stress and alcohol consumption, and a worsening of
environmental pollution caused a noticeable deterioration in health indicators in the late Soviet era. The infant mortality rate,which had plunged from 80.7 per 1000 live births in 1950 to 22.9 per 1000 in 1971, rose to 27.3 per 1000 in 1980, dropping
somewhat to 25.4 per 1000 in 1987. Life expectancy for men, 66 years in the mid-1960s, sagged to 62 years by the early 1980s.
After the rapid succession of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, transitional figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite tradition, beginning in 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev made significant changes in the economy and the party leadership. His policy of
glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship.
In the late 1980s, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union started legal moves towards or even declaration of sovereignty over their territories, citing Article 72 of the USSR Constitution, which stated that any constituent republic was free to secede.
On April 7, 1990 a law was passed, that a republic could secede, if more than two thirds of that republic's residents vote for it on a referendum.[10] Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as "The War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR, which was then the largest constituent republic (with about half of the population) convened a newly
elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected the chairman of the Congress. On June 12, 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the USSR's
laws. The period of legal uncertainty continued throughout 1991 as constituent republics slowly became de facto independent.
A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on March 17, 1991, with the majority of the population voting for preservation of the Union in nine out of fifteen republics. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost, and, in the summer
of 1991, the New Union Treaty was designed and agreed upon by eight republics which would have turned the Soviet Union into a much looser federation.
The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état against Gorbachev by hardline Marxist members of the government, who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin came out as a hero while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared restoration of full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example), while the other 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union.
On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the
authority of the Belavezha Accords to dissolve the Union, on December 21, 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia, including those republics that had signed the Belavezha Accords, signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which
confirmed the dismemberment and consequential extinction of the USSR and restated the establishment of the CIS. The summit of Alma-Ata also agreed on several other practical measures consequential to the extinction of the Union. On December
25, 1991, Gorbachev yielded to the inevitable and resigned as the president of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that until then were vested in the presidency over to Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia. The following day, the
Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body of the Soviet Union, recognized the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolved itself. This is generally recognized as the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state. Many organizations such as the Soviet Army and police forces continued to remain in place in the early months of 1992 but were slowly phased out and either withdrawn from or absorbed by the newly independent states.
2. Emergence of US as the sole superpower
* End of military threat from USSR
* Failure of Communism as an economic ideology
* US success as a capitalist economy
* Collapse of USSR supported leftist regimes across the globe
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 that ended the Cold War, the post-Cold War world was sometimes considered as a unipolar world, with the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower.In the words of Samuel P. Huntington, "The United States, of course, is the sole state with preeminence in every domain of
power — economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural — with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world."
Most experts argue that this older assessment of global politics was too simplified, in part because of the difficulty in classifying the European Union at its current stage of development. Others argue that the notion of a superpower is outdated, considering complex global economic interdependencies, and propose that the world is multipolar.
According to Samuel P. Huntington, "There is now only one superpower. But that does not mean that the world is unipolar. A unipolar system would have one superpower, no significant major powers, and many minor powers." Huntingdon thinks, "Contemporary international politics" ... "is instead a strange hybrid, a uni-multipolar system with one superpower and several major powers."
Additionally, there has been some recent speculation that the United States is declining in power. Citing economic hardships,Cold War allies becoming less dependent on the United States, a rapidly declining dollar, the rise of other great powers around the world, and decreasing education, some experts have suggested the possibility of America losing its superpower status in
the distant future.
3. Aftermath of the collapse of the USSR
* End of communism in the developed world
* Establishment of US as sole superpower
* Rise of Vladimir Putin
* Spread of democracy in Eastern Europe
* Expansion of NATO in Europe
* Slowdown of arms race
The world after the Cold War
The international system is changing fast; its characteristics are not very clear, and less its future. Most changes are the result of the fall of communism, that ended with the bipolar system that characterized the world during 45 years. But before
Communism collapsed, some countries like Japan and Germany started challenging the US. The worldwide economic relations have been changing, from the 70s, as a result of the arising of new economic powers, the restructure of regions and regional
agreements, the deep changes in technology, and a newer international division of labour.
Some of the characteristics of the world nowadays have roots in the Industrial Revolution, as the relations North-South (development/backwardness), even if they have evolved and changed. Others, like the advent of nuclear era, come from WW
II, others from the Cold War period, and others are newer. Scholars emphasize the following trends and characteristics of the present era:
Multipolar System
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bipolar structure also broke. The United States continues being a superpower-a military, technological, economic, and political power. It’s the largest economy in the world, and one of the most efficient, its
currency remains the base of the international exchange, its transnationals are present in the whole world, the largest creditor,exporter and importer.
As the Soviet Union disappeared, the international system could have turned to a unipolar system. But, because of the economic, military, and technological development of countries like Germany, England, France and Japan (that has neither
army nor nuclear weapons), and the military power of China (that possesses nuclear weapons and is an “emerging” economy,exporting and attracting capital) and Russia (that inherited the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union), we are living in a
multipolar system.
If the US continues being the first superpower, uncomparable with England, or France, or Germany, the whole European Union can equalize the economic power of the US. Therefore, the US is trying to consolidate its international political, economic, and
military role. It wants to be protagonist in every international problem, being intermediates or taking the initiative in international actions, like in the Gulf War, in Haiti, Panama, etc, acting, at times within the United Nations frame, at other times against the opinion of the UN.
Globalisation
Globalisation is not a complete new phenomenon. We can compare it with the deep changes originated by the Industrial Revolution that made the world grow smaller.
Again, the technology (computers, satellites, microchips,optical fibres, internet, robots, new materials) is changing the quality and the quantity of economic, cultural, and social exchange dramatically. Globalisation is giving unprecedented opportunities of development to both individuals and countries. But, unfortunately, it is
deepening the differences between individuals, social strata, and regions.
Critics of globalisation emphasise the fact that, today, we are far from an integrated world. Regional agreements or blocs, like the European Union, the North America Free
Trade Agreement, the Asian Pacific Rim, can be an intermediate step to the integration, but they can also start a period of regional competition instead of
integration.
The decline of national sovereignty
The Nation State is the most important international actor. But, in the new globalized world it is not possible that governments control their citizens from the onslaught
of the information from all around the globe. Information transmitted by satellites and Internet, may erode national values and customs. If countries want to attract foreign capital and open the doors to transnationals, they cannot be completely sovereign.
In fact, transnationals can be larger and more powerful than nation states.
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