Why did the Soviet Union, if it was so wonderful, collapse? Some people ask this question, using it as an argument: if everything had been so good, it would not have fallen apart, but others are actually looking for an answer. And one of the most popular answers is the degeneration of nomenclature. The Soviet bureaucracy became so bourgeois that it needed to legitimize its position, and the Soviet Union with its political structure and laws prevented that – hence, as a result, the restoration of capitalism. It's hard to argue with this. Anyone who is at least a little familiar with the history of the USSR understands that the USSR was brought to the end by its own leadership. The leadership had been preparing the masses for this for years. Propaganda can serve a good purpose, it can serve a bad one, but it is an equally effective tool. Now, Trotsky's followers love to remind people that he predicted the collapse of the Soviet project long ago and called the bourgeois degeneration of the Soviet nomenklatura the reason for this collapse. That's how it happened. But I think this is not the answer.
Of course, privilege causes a social stratification. And if it cannot be overcome, it ultimately leads to the restoration of inequality, sooner or later. It is much more interesting to answer the question: why did this very party leadership abandon socialist ideals? This was the Soviet leadership, after all. These were our people, not some spies sent in. These very people published the magazines “Bolshevik”, “Communist University at Home”, satirical magazine “Crocodile” and “Pionerskaya Pravda” for children. They censored “International Panorama” and the comedy TV show “KVN”. After all, they were not sent enemies, but party workers raised in a certain environment. Why did the Western way of life seem to be more attractive to them? Eventually, they began to strive for this lifestyle.
Excerpt from “The Last Autumn”, dir. Vsevolod Plotkin (1990):
- Yes... I wanted to put up a gazebo - there, near the bathhouse, outside the territory, but the neighbor said: “Immodest.” Why, exactly, is it immodest? My father put on boots for the first time during military service. Not only did we not see enough sugar, we didn’t see enough bread!
– You're absolutely right, Mikhail Kirillovich. – Did I end up here right away? No! I set up a youth communist group in the village. I knew the peasant's lot in full. Then I studied, then I worked at the Dnepropetrovsk regional committee. During the war I was in charge of supplying Leningrad; I know firsthand the horrors of the Leningrad blockade. Then I was in Moldova, in the Council of Ministers... Nastya!.. Now, in Moscow... Well, speak up.
– Three Volgas are needed.
– How much are they needed?
– Really.
– Well, if so... And the money?
– Brought it.
– Put it there. My word is law.
– Hello! Where is the master? Well, OK, let's give this a try. I am glad to see the good company!
– Hello.
– My friend, your Gennady is a really great guy!
– What to do! Son and his wife are in the US. Daughter and her husband are in Sweden. My sister, dying, asked me: “Don’t leave Gennady.” He lives with me. The guy is gold! I got him a job as head of the laboratory at the Automotive Research Institute, he's doing great. You could help him get a job at the trade mission. Well, at least in Finland for a start.
– You should marry him!
– So, bring your daughter, let's arrange this! It's time for us to start our own dynasties. After all, we are no worse than others, huh?
– You may be sure that a workplace abroad for your guy is guaranteed.
The issue of equal pay has been raised several times. In theory, everything looks decent, but in practice, if the director of a plant receives the same 100 rubles as an ordinary worker, then he will be faced with the issue of responsibility: the salary is the same, but his responsibility is much higher. What if there is war tomorrow? Industry is being transferred to a war footing, and responsibility is increasing manifold. There are not as many ideologically motivated people at the initial stage of building a new society as we would like, what remains is a material motivation. Therefore, whatever we want, a director of the plant will earn more than a worker. And a talented designer should earn more than an ordinary engineer. Besides monetary motivation, there are other ways: housing, vacation, and so on. So privileges in the first stages are inevitable, and social stratification is (not the same as under capitalism, of course) still inevitable. It would be strange for an opera singer or an outstanding athlete representing our country abroad to live the life of a miner.
And the party officials were different, too: some were burned out at work and others gave out privileges to themselves. Nevertheless, why, having all these privileges, did they look to the West? Why did it happen that even for wealthy people (in the Soviet sense of the word), foreign countries remained more attractive? It would seem that if life under socialism is better than in the countries of the “decaying West,” and you are also endowed with privileges, then why make so much effort to destroy this very life?
I believe that the root cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the war. The USSR could have won this war only in one case: without participating in it, and this was hardly possible. Yes, the Soviet people defeated fascism, and the war ended in Berlin, but we must remember that the Soviet Union was a state that existed in a hostile environment. The USSR had to not only demonstrate to the whole world the successes of the new formation in the shortest possible time, but also actually achieve them. It was literally a matter of survival. We transfer all means of production to public ownership. We are producing ever new means of production, mechanizing labor, enlarging agriculture, industrializing, improving the well-being of the people, shortening the working day, giving people the opportunity to devote more time to education, raising their cultural level, playing sports, and then no amount of chatter about gulags and totalitarianism will be able to hide our successes from the rest of the world. Building socialism in a separate country is both necessary and possible, but only with the prospect of further accession of other countries. Otherwise, there will be complete collapse and transformation into North Korea. Therefore, the implementation of the gigantic volume of tasks that were set before Soviet society did not even imply stopping, let alone regression. Therefore, June 22, 1941 is literally the beginning of the end of the Soviet project. Millions of people worked hard to create the foundation of our future, and on June 22, 1941, this foundation was blown up. Yes, of course, after the war there were reparations and a lot of things were exported from Germany, but all this is absolute nonsense compared to the damage caused, and it’s not just about the economy. Time was lost. Those leading capitalist countries, on whose territory there was no war, have gone far ahead. In addition, a crushing blow was dealt to ideology. Millions of communists died, they were literally the bearers of ideas, the most educated, the most conscious people. They were in the forefront. The war destroyed both the material and ideological basis of the new socialist society. And when the Soviet people saw that in their native country they could not simply produce good shoes, but somewhere in Italy, which did not win the Great War and did not fly into space they could do it, the Soviet people asked questions.
And who, first of all, saw this very Italy, generally abroad? Who was the first to ask these questions? Foreign Ministry employees, embassies, permanent missions, officials from sports, trade, and so on. Employees of all sorts of residencies - they brought home doubts. Where did Vladimir Putin work after studying in the KGB? What could he have thought about socialism when, in 1990, he returned home from a long-term business trip abroad just before the collapse of the Union?
So the betrayal of the leadership is only a consequence, not a cause. Without having time to overcome commodity production, the USSR did not have time to create conditions in which these privileges simply disappear automatically and are leveled out, the conditions in which these privileges are simply not needed. And only one question remains to be answered: will all this happen again in the future? Is it worth building socialism again if a new war could destroy all efforts again? Predicting something is difficult, but the presence of nuclear weapons and the guaranteed retaliatory destruction of the enemy is still a deterrent.
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“On June 22, at exactly 4 o’clock, Kyiv was bombed, and they announced to us that the war had begun.
Kyiv was bombed, they announced to us that the war had begun.
The war began at dawn in order to kill more people.
Parents were sleeping, their children were sleeping when Kyiv began to be bombed.
There were large avalanches of enemies.
There was no strength to hold them.
When they entered the lands of our native Ukraine, they began to kill people.”