>>2689315>>2689328>>2689329>muh great man theory <muh awful man theoryboth wrong. the USSR collapsed not because of any one single cause or person, but because of several causes and several people going back to before its founding. WW1 made the February and October Revolutions possible, but it also sealed the USSR's eventual doom. Because when the Bolsheviks were victorious in Oct 1917, they were born not into an ideal economic situation, but into a country which was losing the biggest war in human history, a war the bolsheviks were willing to sign the punishing treaty of Brest Litovsk to get out of. Then immediately after getting out of the war, a coalition of 14 nations invaded the future USSR to push them back into WW1, and also to collect the tsar's war debts, which the Bolsheviks declared invalid. This also triggered a civil war with monarchist and bourgeois-republican forces, who joined together into an unholy alliance to exorcise the spectre of communism. Once the civil war was through, the USSR was born, but its birth was marked by the birth defects of the problematic and painful pregnancy which preceded it. In the interwar period rapid industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture were necessary, but kulaks resisted violently through sabotage, causing famine. Once rapid industrialization and collective farms were up and running smoothly, the communists had no time to breathe because Hitler was already beginning his conquest of Europe, and being appeased by England and France. The bourgeois liberals of Western Europe were signing non-aggression pacts with Hitler, long before the USSR did, and they were rejecting any potential anti-fascist alliance with the communists at first. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie of North America were helping Hitler as well, especially Ford and IBM. Hitler's goal was total extermination of "judeobolshevism" and ᴉuᴉlossnW also was taking over Italy. So far the USSR has had ZERO TIME TO BREATHE in the first 30 years of its existence, and on the 31 year, the great purge came in 1938. In 1939 the USSR did the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to buy time and move factories east. Some Communists and their sympathizers in the West were shocked and appalled by this realpolitik and did not have the benefit of hindsight like we do. Hitler violated the pact anyway and launched operation barbarossa, killing millions of soviet citizens. WW2 was bloody and resulted in extermination of many people in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and other soviet nations. Recovery was slow and anemic, because the USSR refused to take the Marshall plan aid, which would have required privatization of their economy along capitalist lines, and payment of exorbitant interest rates. This refusal not only made their recovery slower than West Germany, which was injected with US cash, called an "economic miracle on the rhine," but NATO was created around the same time, along with nuclear weapons, necessitating an endless arms race and the cold war, therefore more military spending for the USSR than would have otherwise been the case. USSR tried to join NATO in 1954, but since the purpose of NATO was to "keep the Russians out, the Germans down, the Americans in," the USSR was not allowed to join, USSR was once again forced down a path of siege warfare against the capitalist world. Around this time as well, the postcolonial movement mostly chose to call itself "non aligned" rather than explicitly siding with the Soviets, and the UN was created to give an illusion of postcolonial sovereignty. The UN approved of the US invading DPRK, after artificially dividing the country in the 1940s and installing a US military dictatorship in the South. PRC won its civil war, but this would create problems later with the Sino-Soviet split. In 1953 Sputnik was launched, Stalin died, and the USSR begin to win the space race, but this wouldn't matter much in the long run. Khruschevite revisionism spat on Stalin's legacy, Brezhnev oversaw a period of stagnation, the USSR bit lethal bait in Afghanistan laid by operation Cyclone, and got its own equivalent of the Vietnam war, and Gorbachev managed the decline and dissolution. Yeltsin took over the federation and privatized everything in a drunken rampage. We all know the story now of how the nation with the most female pHd students became a hotbed of poverty and child prostitution in the 1990s as the privatization effort sold off former Soviet state assets at bargain bin prices to western capitalist plunderers. The entire history of the USSR from beginning to end can be analogized to a starving man locked inside a small house, in an armed standoff with the police outside. He never had a chance. It was just the Paris commune, but for 80 years instead of 3 months.