Mikhail Gorbachev was a farmer and later member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He ascended to become secretary of the party Central Committee and was eventually appointed to the Politburo Executive Committee, the highest executive committee within the party and the de facto ruling body of the country. Following the death of Konstantin Chernenko, he was eventually elected President of the Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Committee by the Politburo in 1985.
Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors, realised where the issues of the Soviet Union had come from, as he was the only leader to have been born and grown up after the revolution. Much of government economic policy was centred around a command economy, in which many economic activities were planned centrally by the government, who prioritised machinery and large projects over consumer goods and quality. The inefficiency and bureaucracy of the Soviet economy also began to show. Many Soviet projects involved the government setting a goal and throwing as much money at it until it happened. This meant that less efficient, and thus longer, processes received more funding over the quicker ones, even if they both achieved the same goal.
They also spent far too much on weapons in order to compete with the United States as a superpower whilst also prioritising policies that were “communist” regardless of whether it worked or not. This disregard for pragmatism and solely prioritising ideological loyalty meant mass housing projects had extremely poor living standards, a free healthcare system was notoriously poor and cheaper food came at the cost of an unhealthy diet. Gorbachev was one of the only few to realise this, and began implementing mass reforms, constraining the power of the secret police, known as the KGB, bringing about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and returning power to the people instead of the tight grip on power at the top. What was important to note was that Gorbachev was not opposed to communism, but instead believed that the Soviet system, established by Lenin, tightened by Stalin and enforced by Brezhnev, was a bastardisation of communism and had become nothing more than a bloated bureaucracy that did not serve the people like the initial ideology was founded upon.
There is plenty of everything: land, oil and gas, other natural riches, and God gave us lots of intelligence and talent, yet we lived much worse than developed countries and keep falling behind them more and more. The reason could already be seen: the society was suffocating in the vise of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race.
Gorbachev in his resignation speech
One of the key steps in delivering his change was replacing the hardline Stalinists in government with those more open to change. One notable member of this group was Boris Yeltsin, the chair of the Communist Party in Moscow. He began improving diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, by opening up foreign investment, opening up trade opportunities and ceasing production of weaponry in order to bring an end to the Cold War, strongly contrasting with American policy of increasing military spending to combat the “evil empire.” He also transformed the Soviet economy from the command economy to a mixed economy, which incorporated more free market elements. Whilst businesses had to make a minimum amount set by the government to give to the state, they could also go above the minimum and sell that for profit.
The government stopped propping up failing businesses and introduced limited private ownership and reduced state control over enterprises. However, this shift from a far-left centralised economy to a left-wing or centre-left mixed economy faced hardships. Whilst many expected this stark change to create a temporary and small economic downturn, the downturn extended much longer than was anticipated. Firstly, Gorbachev overestimated how mismanaged the economy actually was, as when they withdrew funds from failing businesses, wide gaps in the market opened up, leading to rationing of resources and overcrowding of shops and infamous massive queues. In addition, tax breaks combined with increased spending in certain areas led to a massive government deficit. This wouldn’t have been an issue if the transition was faster, but, as Gorbachev stated in his resignation speech, the old system had collapsed too quickly and did not give enough time for the new system to build.
Meanwhile, social reforms were improving too. Many in the Soviet leadership believed that democracy should take a more important factor in communism, holding them to account when they were voted out by the people that communism claimed to serve. With the restriction of the secret police, the publishing of government documents and the permission to publish previously banned books an intellectual renaissance was created within the Soviet Union and its client states. However, this did not go the way the government intended. Instead of people seeing the transparency of the government and thinking of ways to fix the communist system, they instead decided to remove communism altogether.
In Poland, a trade union rebellion instigated the first democratic elections in Poland since the 1930s, in which the anti-Soviet liberal Solidarity Citizens’ Committee won a 99 out of 100 seat majority in the Polish Senate. The very notable thing that the Soviet Union did, however, was nothing. Unlike prior revolutions in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the Soviet Union did not strike back against the trade unionists with military force. All of a sudden multiple protests occurred across Eastern Europe in 1989, all of which resulted in democratic elections and the end of communist rule for the first time in nearly 50 years. Most notably Hungary opened up its fenced off border with Austria, allowing the first citizens to cross the Iron Curtain.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, many other European nations began to reject communism. In Bulgaria, the Communist Party agreed to free elections after mass protests, while in Czechoslovakia the Velvet Revolution saw huge, peaceful demonstrations force the government to resign. In Romania, however, the collapse of communism was far more violent, as armed clashes in the streets led to the overthrow and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, footage that was later broadcasted on TV. Together, these events showed that Soviet control over Eastern Europe had fatally weakened, feeding a wave of anti-communist sentiment that eventually reached Moscow.
By 1991, the reforms had fatally weakened the political foundations of the Soviet state. Mass protest movements across Eastern Europe and within the Union’s own republics had already dismantled Communist rule beyond Moscow’s control. These pressures converged with institutional decay within party leadership. Economic decline, declining faith in Marxist ideology and the erosion of censorship under Gorbachev deprived the Communist Party of its claim to political necessity. When Gorbachev permitted competitive elections in the Republics that made up the USSR in 1990, the Union’s authority was further fractured by creating a dual structure of power. Gorbachev had remained President of the Union, while the Russian Republic elected Yeltsin as its own president, challenging the supremacy of the Soviet state from within.
This unresolved constitutional conflict culminated in August 1991. A group of senior Party officials, military commanders, and KGB leaders formed an emergency committee and placed Gorbachev under house arrest while he was on holiday in Crimea. Declaring that reforms had endangered socialism and national stability, they announced a state of emergency and attempted to restore central control through force. Tanks entered Moscow and surrounded the Russian parliament building, the “White House,” where Yeltsin and his supporters established a barricade to resist the oncoming army. The coup plotters proved incapable of securing loyalty from either the armed forces or the public. After three days of mass demonstrations, military defections, and administrative paralysis, the coup collapsed. Its failure discredited the Communist Party beyond recovery and destroyed what remained of Soviet authority.
In the weeks that followed, republics including Ukraine and Belarus declared full independence. The Communist Party was banned in Russia, its assets seized, and the Union reduced to a powerless committee. In December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus formally dissolved the Soviet Union. The Cold War ended not through military defeat, as many had expected, but through political implosion. A system built on ideological unity collapsed when it could no longer reconcile reform with authority, or central control with national self-determination. Unlike the Third Reich, the Soviet Union did not come crashing down in a burning wreck but merely fizzled out.
