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The Collapse Of The Soviet Union

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The quick collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 appalled everyone in the West, but that is because no one outside the Soviet Union knew what was going on. The Soviet government’s lies of economic success and superiority over the Western capitalist states had controlled the citizens of Russia to believe that the USSR’s Communist regime was growing for half a decade. It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev that mocked previous leaders like Stalin and Brezhnev for being responsible for not improving the Soviet economy. Gorbachev’s reforms to modernize the USSR created more freedom and openness for Russians, but sprawled uprisings and revolutions in the Central Asia and the Baltic states. The inability to keep up with the United States economically in the 1970s and 1980s along with the later reforms to improve the Soviet economy in Gorbachev’s term led to the downfall of the USSR.
Leonid Brezhnev had taken over as the head of the Communist party in 1964 by replacing Nikita Khrushchev, an anti-Stalinist who strived for reform and modernization in the USSR. Brezhnev was an old Communist that wanted to keep the government and its policies similar to Stalin’s views. He used the buildup of the military and its strength comparable to the United States. The main issue with strengthening the military was that it required twice the amount of GNP than the United States did. Money, manpower and machinery were subsided from the civilian economy so the military could be equally as strong as the

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