Date: 2025-07-03 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017161
Geopolitics
USSR
Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? ... William Taubman, professor of Political Science at Amherst College sheds a light on how Mihail Gorbachev undermined the Soviet system
Peter Burgess
184,320 views
Wellesley College Russian Department Published on Apr 24, 2017
April 5, 2017 In this lecture, William Taubman, professor of Political Science at Amherst College and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, sheds a light on how Mihail Gorbachev undermined the Soviet system in pursuit of his dream of the democratized country.
Comments 9 months ago My opinion, I'm from former USSR: Well-working socialism requires enormously strong discipline, determination and morale from the whole structure of society. It's literally a machine made of people doing their work properly, with folks there are organisations formed, and each depends on other organisations for own functioning. There are systems of self-regulation of course, but in general – socialist society has way-way lower threshold of going into cascade downfall. Socialism is too complex and overdependent onto it's well-being. The moment there are any problems – people's morale falls, which leads to worsening productivity at some organisations first, and then it reflects onto whole system since it's too interconnected. What happened in 1980s was too much of a hit for soviet society to take, and it spiraled down with no discipline to keep things going. In comparison with capitalist economy – it's multiple times redundant and very independent across it's structure. If a bread producing company dies – there's probably several more companies in the same town competing, so people would never be out of bread. In socialism there's only one company, the huge govt. one, and if it fails to deliver for some reason – people won't get their bread that day. They'll get pissed off and will probably work less effective, which won't supply enough goods to other industries. Here's already a wave that will hit the whole economy, and it came practically out nowhere. 27