The Break up of Union of Soviet Socialist Republic

In one week, the summer of 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, became history. The forces of reform unleashed by President Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid 1980’s generated a democratic movement. “Mr. Gorbachev may be revered for the democratic forces he unleashed- his policies of perestroika, or reconstructing, and glasnost, or openness. However, his failure to put food on Soviet tables and his reluctance to move boldly on economic reforms doomed him to be a failure'; (Sieff). His economic policies threw his country into even more turmoil and chaos, as the different nationalities used their new freedoms to move away from the union. “Gorbachev sincerely wanted to reform the communist system, but he did not want to eliminate it. He recognized there was a lot of wrong with his country, but right to the end, he never grasped the extent of the problem'; (Russia). As a result, the breakup of the Soviet Union was not a singular event that occurred overnight, rather was caused by decades of neglect and abuse to the former nations by the central communist government. A government that would never end, but find ways to cover-up its identity.

From the start of the Twenty- Seventh Party Congress in 1986, perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “economic, political, and social reconstructing, became the unintended catalyst for dismantling what had taken nearly three- quarters of a century to erect'; (Perestroika). Conservatives have called it as a “public effort to subtly seduce the Western world to lower its guard'; (Corpus), believing it was a disguise just to distract foreign nations. Liberals believe it that it is a “mandate for disarmament and cooperation between two extremely different value systems while under the death threat of nuclear war'; (Corpus). However, Gorbachev declares that it is a “union of principals and socialism and not a response to a poor domestic economy or wholesale abandonment of basic communist tenets'; (Corpus). Furthermore, he asserts that perestroika is a “blueprint for the Soviet Union to emerge from the economic backwardness into global industrial competitiveness'; (The Meaning Perestroika). He believed that was the only way that the Soviet Union would be able to survive now. Yet, the question of &#822...

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...stonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been cruelly seized and murderously purged by Josef Stalin in 1940 in a secret deal with Adolph Hitler (Russia). Yet, the people of these nations remembered and were angry. Whether it was ignorance or neglect, Gorbachev indeed “believed the communist history books he had read at school, which brushed over and explained some of the greatest crimes of the century. So, he never thought of the Ukraine as having been forcibly conquered by the Red Army in 1919-1920, or as the victim of deliberate genocidal famine policies in the 1930’s'; (Yakolev). Nevertheless, the Ukrainians remember all the crimes against them, and when they express their desire for full independence, it came as a shock. It is ignorance and stupidity of Gorbachev that he did not realize that these consequences would occur if he permitted people to speak in “openness';. His policies of perestroika and glasnost gave these oppressed nations the weapons and tools to fight and break away from a totalitarian government. Former President Mikhail Gorbachev was always more loved and admired in the White House and in the State Department, than among his own people.