[ecshafer]

The causes of the downfall of the USSR seems to always line up with whatever political angle the writer has. Leftwing can point to a lack of (political) liberalization or poor planning, rightwing can point to not going further on (economic) liberalization. It's a topic that is really valuable to think tanks based on their politics and their donor's politics.

[flavius29663]

And very few people look at what topped it off: the cold war. The insane pressure from the US caused USSR to overspend on military when then barely fed their population. I think people should say "US won the cold war" rather than "the cold war ended" or "the USSR collapsed". It didn't collapse on it's own...as bad as communism was for the population, they could have potentially carry it on forever, like North Korea, if it wasn't for the US pressure.

[avmich]

It's interesting that likely the biggest beneficiaries of Cold War ending were Russians, not Americans. So maybe US won the cold war - even though they were really worried about collapse of USSR and creation of multiple states instead the former one - but Russians certainly got something out of that collapse.

EDIT: and by "Russians" here I rather mean "former Soviet citizens".

[merpnderp]

It's not like the US kept it a secret that they wanted to either gain enough of a military advantage over the USSR to remove them as a viable threat or force them to keep spending ever more amounts of resources on military boondoggles.

[VictorPath]

The USSR economy did pretty well under Stalin, especially during the Depression that affected the west. Khrushchev deprioritized capital expenditures and that was the beginning of the end. Similar story in the DDR around the time of Stalin's death.

[georgeecollins]

No, that is completely wrong that the USSR economy did well during the depression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

There are many other sources / economists who will support that, wikipedia is just the fastest.

Stalin's government did do a great job of ramping up industrial production before and during WW2.

[VictorPath]

The same weather problems that hit the Ukraine in the early 1930s hit the US too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl .

The economic landscape of the US at the time was the Depression, whereas the USSR economy was chugging along, other than the poor harvest in the Ukraine that year. Walter Duranty of the New York Times visited Ukraine at the time, and said the harvest was not a good one but a lot of reports coming out of the Ukraine were overblown.

[baybal2]

Both Victor's, and your point is completely incorrect.

The point is, whatever survivor's of thirties tell, thirties were a terrible time, even if they were living in a relatively well off Moscow.

That's the only truth, not that of lunatical historians which have nothing, but digits to look on, and imagining things well knowing that pretty much nothing in official economics documents from USSR' reflected reality.

Stalin, and his industrial proves is another busted for 100th time trope, straight out of original propaganda. A thing glaringly obvious to any Russian citizen who had at some time a surviving relative who went through that time, but not to people who purposefully keep returning to it for search of their worldview validation "alternative facts"

[VictorPath]

Well if the USSR economy was in shambles in 1941, that makes the Red Army's pushback of Barbarossa, and the reversal of initiative at Stalingrad all the more impressive.

[nickff]

Most people in the West (both left and right-wing) thought the USSR was much more economically productive than it actually was, and that the populace was more supportive of the regime than was the case. The Chinese learned very valuable lessons from the USSR, namely that liberalization is very dangerous for a regime; North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.

I am not sure how earlier political liberalization could have saved the USSR, which was essentially a (communist) imperialist dictatorship.

[avmich]

> North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.

NK doesn't go to wars outside it. And they have support of China. This surely supports a long term stability... but how much of a long term, remains to be seen.