>>722413Why the Soviet System Was Vulnerable to Internal Decay
The USSR's power structure, had unique vulnerabilities that a bourgeois state does not.
The Fusion of Party and State: A Single Point of Failure.
In the USSR, all political, economic, and ideological power was concentrated in a single institution: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). There were no independent power centers.
No Independent Capitalist Class: There was no separate bourgeoisie that owned the means of production and could act as a counterweight to the state. The nomenklatura (the party-state elite) was the ruling class, but its power was entirely dependent on its position within the party apparatus.
Consequence: If you could gain control of the top levers of the Party—as Gorbachev did as General Secretary—you had the formal authority to redirect the entire state machinery. There was no powerful capitalist class outside the state to stop you. Yakovlev and Gorbachev didn't have to defeat a rival class; they had to persuade, outmaneuver, or purge other factions within their own class.
The Crisis of Ideological Legitimacy.
By the 1980s, the ideological "glue" of the USSR—the belief in Marxism-Leninism and the inevitable triumph of communism—had largely dissolved among the elite and the populace. It had become a hollow ritual.
The system was justified by its results (economic growth, social mobility, victory in WWII), but when the economy stagnated, this justification vanished.
Consequence: When Gorbachev (Glasnost) allowed open criticism, the system had no ideological antibodies to fight the infection. There was no deeply held, popular belief in the system to defend it. The "reformers" were operating in an ideological vacuum they could fill with their own ideas.
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