What were the major reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in Essay

What were the major reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - Essay Example To begin with, the collapse of the Soviet Union was much a consequential effect of poor managerial aspects of the political system inexistence. Established in 1922 under Vladimir Lenin, Soviet Union was built on terror upon the larger citizenry, orchestrated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) machinery engineered by Joseph Stalin, the party’s first General Secretary. Intolerant to any form of criticism, Stalin basically murdered millions opposed to his authoritarian nature of leadership; a style of leadership that would set the tone of communism for several decades, in effect, forcefully actualizing the acceptance of the Soviet Union’s governance with all the ills without questioning. In addition to his firm grip on the government machinery, his policy of dà ©tente basically cut off the Soviets from the world. His leadership was one of a kind that non-would have wanted to follow. Accordingly, long before Gorbachev’s assumed power in 1985, successi ve leadership beginning with Nikita Khrushchev-the immediate Stalin’s successor, made numerous changes; gradually losing the very fundamental facets of the Stalinist control (Dallin and Lapidise 675). As ideas from the west, spread in part by academics, begun reaching the masses, commitments to the Soviet Orthodoxy begun a fast downward trend; the exposure to the superior living standards in the west in addition to the political freedoms resulted in widespread jitters in the late seventies through to the Eighties ultimately forcing the introduction of Gorbachev’s ‘glasnost’ (Dallin and Lapidise 681). Instead of rectifying the hitherto growing dissatisfaction, the ‘glasnost’ unveiled the ills of the past regimes, further bringing into question the ideals of communism and legitimacy of the regime in power then. In reality, ideologies advanced by Gorbachev and his