he collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's was a great blow to the hopes of revolutionaries. Why did it collapse? The primary causes were political and economic and they were the result of the culture of war.
The immediate cause of the Soviet collapse was economic, as the Soviet Union lost the arms race and international competition with the West. The United States was able to profit from its imperialist exploitation of other countries, while socialism could only lose economically in that competition. By the end, the ruble collapsed as Soviet consumers turned to imports to satisfy their needs. They could not buy a good pair of leather boots or a good television set or a computer made in the Soviet Union, because all the boots and the electronics were swallowed up by military procurement. And, needless to say, there were no quality goods to export in order to balance imports. So the economy floundered as the debt mounted and more and more resources were redirect \ed to the failed arms race, sound familiar?
Economic factors were linked to political and psychological factors. As the Soviet economist Latsis said at the time, "the gloomy background of the worsening market situation ... has a depressing effect on people." Their gloom deepened as a result of policy failures such as the explosion of the Chernobyl atomic power plant and the war in Afghanistan (see US military analysis of Afghan war).
Another factor was the lack of honest information, the secrecy and propaganda that is central to the culture of war. As contradictions mounted the Soviet people became more and more cynical about the propaganda of government-controlled media. It was common to hear the Russian people say that you could find truth anywhere except in Pravda and the news anywhere except in Izvestia. This was exacerbated by the propaganda warfare carried out by the West in Radio Free Europe and by dissidents in self-published Samizdat. Hmm, sound like the FISA Courts, Patriot Act, RICO Statutes, Warrantless Searches be conducted under the so called War or Terrorism.
Secrecy and distortion of information have disastrous economic as well as political effects. As explained in a 1991 article "Secrecy and restricted movement, the hallmarks of militarism and bureaucracy, pervaded Soviet society when I was working there. They hampered the work of the scientific institutes where I was located, even though they were not doing military research. As a result, I found that all levels of the system, from institutes to ministries, were isolated from each other, both by barriers to communication and by an attitude that one should mind one's own business."
The command-administrative model of war-communism hobbled economic development. As the article by Latsis put it, "The glitter of [the war-time economic] miracle blinded us for decades, and the command-administrative methods of the extensively developing economy took firm root in the country." In our case we have Obama meddling in private industry, failing to allow drilling for natural resources
When, at the end, the Gorbachev administration realized that they would have to convert military industry to civilian production, they could not even get the Defense Ministry to give them an accurate list of defense industries (See Agaev remarks to the United Nations). In other words, the Soviet Union had developed its own military-industrial complex.
