Economic Reasons and Mechanisms of the Disintegration of the Soviet Union

Abstract

In December 1991, finally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke up, a fact that can be considered the largest geopolitical event of the twentieth century. The disintegration of the Soviet empire marked the end of the bipolar international system, in which two rival blocks organized ideologically, politically, economically and militarily around the two global superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union competed with each other. The collapse of the USSR finally freed the democratizing Central European satellite socialist block from the dependence on Moscow, on the wave of the perestroika and its own mass democratic movements. Several groups of factors can be distinguished, that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ideology on which it based – communism. These were ideological, political, economic, national and social factors. This text deals with the economic causes of the collapse of the USSR, because the economy was recognized by Marxist Soviet ideologists as the “base” of the entire system, and the other its components as the “superstructure”.