Pointless Struggle: the Aftermath of the Fall of the Soviet Union 

“I, like many others knew that the USSR needed radical change. If I had not understood this, I would have never accepted the position of General Secretary”, that was said by Mikhail Gorbachev. Over a long period of time, the Soviet Union or (USSR) stood firm as one of the world’s superpowers.

With socialism, all property in a society is owned and shared equally by the people. Communism has the same philosophy, but takes it a step further. Communism is where the government advocates control off all industry, agriculture, and other private property. Communists believe the state should use violent means, when necessary, to seize factories and farms from private ownership. The breakup of the Soviet Union resulted with as follows: the five year plan, the slow of factory production, the failure of communism, the Cold War, Star Wars, meaningless oil and gas politics, and lastly, mass destruction of rogue states with terrorist organizations.

The failure of the Communist economy was a great factor in the Soviet Union’s collapse. “Unable to compete economically with the industrialized West, the USSR slowly ran out of food and other basic consumer goods”. This led to citizens to live a modest life with little hope of gathering wealth or bettering their standards of living. The Soviet Union’s economic calamity can be traced as far back as the 1920s. Lenin wanted to make the USSR into a classless society so he first examined the rural regions. He appointed Committees of Poor Peasants charged with driving wealthy landowners, or kulaks, off their estates and farms. The peasants often engaged violence to rid their villages of the kulaks who left their land behind. Conflicts like this occurred all over the Soviet Union. It led to a great grain shortage because the previous kulak farms stopped being productive. Lenin reacted by ordering the government to buy all available grain from the small farms that were still producing crops. The government set the prices, which quited competition, providing little income for working farmers. By the year of 1929 famine was spread across the Soviet Union. Stalin, who was then in power, intended to solve the grain storage by having smaller farms join together to form very large farms. Moreover, the large farms could afford expensive farming machinery and pay for the laborers needed to till the crops.

The “collectivization” of farms was the centerpieces of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. It was his overall program, which was announced in 1928, to rescue the Soviet economy. Stalin is quoted on the day he announced the collectivization program, “Agriculture is developing slowly, comrades. This is because we have about 25 million individually owned farms. They are the most primitive and undeveloped form of economy. We must do our utmost to develop large farms and convert them into grain factories for the country organised on a modern scientific basis”.

Only the most passionate Communist supported the Five-Year Plan.In the countryside many of the individual farmers, worked hard to accumulate their land and livestock. Many farmers whose land was collectivized took off takinging their belongings and farm animals with them. The Kazakhstan farmers were opposed to collectivization. By 1938 it was estimated that their population of 1.2 million dropped to fewer than 600,000. The Kazakhstan farmers decided to go elsewhere rather than to lose their belongings to collectivization.

About 90 percent of Soviet farms had been collectivized by 1936, but the system never turned out to be the success Stalin envisioned. Farmers who stayed earned even less than the smallest farms would have before collectivization. Nonetheless, work on a collective farm was mandatory. If the state ordered a Soviet citizen to work on a collective farm, they had no choice. Regardless of his or her experience the citizen had no power to refuse. Over time the Soviet people viewed employment on collective farms as as form of serfdom or feudal laborer. Vandalism and insurrection became popular on collective farms. “To protest low wages, workers killed livestock, smashed farm machinery, and sabotaged crops”. In the 1930s, the famine that started the Five-Year Plan grew worse.

The problems of small time farming that Stalin said could be solved by collectivization were yet to being solved. Machinery that larger farms “could afford” was often in short supply. Soviet factories were poorly run and lacked raw materials needed to produce the machines as well as replacement parts.

Another part of the failing Five-Year Plan was the nationalization of industries meaning government seized ownership of the nation’s factories. The government decided what products to produce, how much to produce, what prices to charge for merchandise, and how much to pay workers. This seemed to be communism in its purest form. State control over industry with the wealth generated by factories distributed among workers, rather than into the pockets of a handful wealthy capitalists.

However, Stalin wanted to vision the Soviet economy recover as quickly as possible. In wanting that, he ordered the new state-owned factories to increase production. “To meet Stalin’s high quotas, factories had to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week”. This brought steady employment, but the working conditions were poor and housing was in short supply. A quote from Geoffrey Hosking, a professor of Russian history at the University Of London explains more clearly: “Finding a job was not now too difficult, since employment vanished early in the Five Year Plan, but conditions at most workplaces were so grim employees would quit pretty soon in order to find something else less bad….They would try to install their families in a room, provide food and clothing, and seek schooling for their children. Securing the simplest facilities schooling for their children. Securing the simplest facilities required either bribery or using “pull,” the influence of a boss”.

Another result of the Soviet Union’s fall would be the slow of factory production. The culture of classlessness society by Lenin impeded factory production. “Bosses were prohibited from giving orders, and committees of workers were supposed to resolve disputes and find ways to boost production. But infighting, political squabbling, and the general ineffectiveness of the system slows everything down”. In the year 1939 the Soviet Union was at war. The Soviet Union had “constrained Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to admit Soviet garrisons onto their territories”. Finland was requested to do the same but refused. Men everywhere were being drafted for the Russo-Finnish War. On November 30th, 1939, Soviet troops attacked Finland. Agricultural and industrial production suffered. Furthermore, all the food that was produced went to the military. Most families had to endure the war years on the verge of starvation. After the war, Soviet soldiers went back to their collective farms and factory jobs to find conditions had little to no change.

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev enacted a series of reforms for life on the collective farms and in the factories to improve. Wages proceeded low whereas, workers had opportunities to earn bonuses based on their production. “Workers believed that they had incentives now to earn higher wages, Soviet farming and industry were still bogged down and by many of the same problems that existed for decades: TRactors could not be driven because parts were unavailable. Seeds and other supplies sat in warehouses because rail transportation was sporadic [or scattered]”. Therefore, farm managers and foremen were often corrupt; “falsifying production records in order to earn bonuses”.

The classless society was still in effect with Khrushchev’s administrations. Bosses still had little authority in their factories. Workers could now turn down disagreeable jobs. The jobs still had low pay, however, the government paid for health care and child care, and if one was without a home, the government provided housing. Almost no one worked hard because it was practically impossible to be fired. Aleksandr Zinoviev, a mathematician studying the Soviet work environment in the 1950s, once said, “People… swap news, amuse themselves, do all kinds of things to preserve and improve their well-being depends, go to innumerable meetings, get sent to leave on rest homes, are assignments accommodations and sometimes supplementary food products”.

For the (simple) reason that, the that Soviets lacked trade partners and international markets for Soviet-made goods, little income was transmitted into the country. This made food and custom goods hard to find in the Communist countries. The President of the Soviet Union died in 1982. He was succeeded by former head of the KGB. Many people did not think the USSR would change. “Andropov was well aware of the dismal condition of his country’s economy and pledged to make reforms”. He sent police to find truant workers and force them to return to their job. Additionally, he started the Soviet Union on a path market-based economy, naming free-market proponents to top posts in the Soviet Union bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, Andropov died in 1984, and Mikhail Gorbachev took his place. Gorbachev thought the Soviet Union could no longer sustain its Lenin-ear economic policies. “Gorbachev initiated the programs of glasnost (openness) and perestroika”. Glasnost was the attempt to ease state control over the rights of Soviet citizens giving them freedom of speech and other rights enjoyed by people in open societies. Perestroika was an attempt to rebuild the Soviet economy by encouraging private entrepreneurship.

Gorbachev kept finding himself putting out fires across the USSR. In fact, this is where one ultimately sees communism failing. Workers in Poland, led by shipyard worker Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement, demanded human rights and economic freedoms denied them by the USSR. “The popular uprising toppled the Soviet-backed Polish government in 1990. Similar uprisings unseated regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Lithuania.” Other governments were not pleased by these acts. Consequently, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the largest single state in USSR, and banned the Communist Party in his country. The year, 1991 passionate Communists attempted to stage a coup d'état (overthrowing) against Gorbachev, but Yeltsin interfered and won Gorbachev’s release. Communism became dead in the former Soviet Union by the government’s longtime commitment to an economic model that soon failed.

Due to Washington and Moscow relations deteriorating, the Cold War began in 1945. “At the close of World WarⅡ , the Soviet Union stood firmly entrenched in Eastern Europe, intent upon installing governments that would pay allegiance to the Soviet Union”.

The Soviet Union wanted to expand its security zone into North Korea, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, the U.S. established a security zone as well. It included Western Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

Leaving the Soviet Union outnumbered. “The conflict in the war was more political than military. Both sides squabbled with each other at the UN, sought close relations with other nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing versions of a postwar world”. Notwithstanding, by year 1950 the Cold War became an increasingly militarized struggle. 

To conclude, USSR was a nation with a large and diverse population, an abundance of natural resources, fearsome military might, and accumulation of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the people of the Soviet Union lived under totalitarian governments and economies based on socialism and communism.