Collapse of Soviet Union Chou Term Paper

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The Soviet Union had been administered for the past 70 years through a tight control on information. Gorbachev's policy of openness threw open the floodgates. The Soviet people had been kept on a tight leash through tight control on information and "fear" by an oppressive government. (Kedzie, 1997) the lifting of the fear factor did not result in, as Gorbachev had hoped, improvement in the social and economic conditions within the existing system. When the ordinary people found more out about the outside world and their own history, they chose to ignore "perestroika" altogether and opted instead to change the system itself. To make matters worse, all that Gorbachev's "reforms" managed to do was to disrupt the operations of the existing planned economy, provoking a further slowdown in growth leading to widespread shortages of consumer goods. (Moorewood, 1998)

Nationalism

Nationalism in the Soviet bloc's satellites such as East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania et al. As well as the Soviet Union's own republics had been simmering under the surface for a long time. When Gorbachev himself declared that the Soviet Union would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Eastern European countries and encouraged their 'puppet' Communist regimes to follow their own 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' the final nail was driven in the coffin of the Soviet Union.
Initially, popular national movements erupted in the Soviet satellite states leading to the overthrow of their Communist regimes. Russian nationalism itself raised its head under the leadership of Boris Yeltsen wanting a separate Russian state. The Soviet republics in the Baltic, European USSR and the Central Asia, perhaps left with no alternative, declared their own independence. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union no longer existed......

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"Collapse Of Soviet Union Chou", 27 November 2004, Accessed.19 May. 2024,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/collapse-soviet-union-chou-59842