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In 1992, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Soviet Union had encompassed a rather large part of the globe. When the USSR collapsed it disintegrated into fifteen separate countries which were the following: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union are often debated.

This essay shall look at the effects of Glasnost and Perestroika and whether they can and should be associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first part will look at the main schools of thought upon which arguments are formed as to the causes of the collapse. The second part of this essay shall make the argument that it was a mixture of bad economics, some feelings of illegitimacy within some of the republics i.e, the Baltics and badly timed policy decisions such as, glasnost and perestroika.

Key theoretical arguments as to why the Soviet Union collapsed.

The essentialist argument suggests that the Soviet Union’s origin is key to understanding the collapse of the Union essentialist like Martin Malia that the Leninist’s original seizure of power was steeped in illegitimacy that had left a “genetic code” that was ingrained into the Soviet regime and ruling party which acted in a fashion as the “original sin” (Dallin, pg 279). This original sin effectively doomed the Soviet Union to failure. Malia’s argument as summed up by Dallin, is “Throughout its history, the Soviet system was essentially unchangeable: whatever the alterations in institutions, polices, and personalities, these were relatively trivial as throughout it was and remained an “idocracy” and a “partocracy” (Dallin, pg 279).

The l...

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...r Zhivago. Although Gorbachev's attempts at perestroika ultimately failed, he drastically changed the perceptions of the outside world towards Russia.[4]

Liberalization policy demands a convertible currency. One of the main problems of the transition of the former Soviet economy to a market economy lies in the inconvertibility of the currency. A market economy requires a widely accepted medium of exchange that can purchase goods and services on the domestic market (internal convertibility), and that is easily converted into foreign currency

(external convertibility) at free market rates. The reality of the Soviet economy under Gorbachev was that the rouble was neither an internally or externally convertible currency. Despite the wide variety of proposals for rouble convertibility, most have in common the reliance of a central banking system to institute the reform.