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Some of long standing, some more recent (as of 1990), some economic and some political and some psychological.
Russia wasn't a big exporter of oil; neither did it import just a great deal. Oil wasn't a big deal. Currency valuation would have been important, but that was a recent factor and had only become an official factor in the late '80s (while it was an unofficial factor before that) ... when it's a non-convertible currency, you get rid of some problems.
Gaidar looks to long-term underlying inefficiencies in the economy. His prime example is grain: Production didn't increase from the '60s to the '80s because of extreme inefficiency--lack of fertilizers, motivation to produce more, to bring more land under production, to avoid rendering land unusable, shortfall in tractors and no decrease in waste. (Of course, he has to start *after* Khrushchev's disaster of a maize campaign.) The same could be said about nearly everything else: The economy wasn't growing, even as the rest of the world's was. Gaidar's claim is that ultimately the USSR collapsed of its own accord. Andrei Amal'rik, a minor dissident from the '60s and '70s, would have agreed, but he put the USSR's downfall, rhetorically at least, in 1984 or before. But Gaidar is an economist, so all questions are economic.
It's hard to disagree with that being the ultimate cause. But it's not enough to cause a country to disintegrate. So there are other causes. At least Amal'rik took into account psychological factors that Gaidar didn't.
At the same time, the country was hermetically sealed, and told that it was the best. The West was about to collapse, things were truly crappy her, illiteracy was rampant, with riots in the streets and a shortfall in technology. The computerization of American society in the '80s couldn't have happened. When the US provided gobs of grain in the '70s, it was barely reported on--it was, after all, impossible. With more contacts, it became more obvious the USSR was in a technologically backwards zone, not the pinnacle of human achievement. Never underestimate the effect of national disillusionment and humiliation.
It didn't help when it was revealed that many of the USSR's great advances were Western technology reverse-engineered. Even the Soviet A-bomb wasn't truly home-grown. If *that* was all that was protecting the USSR from the ever-imminent Western invasion, one had to wonder why there had been no invasion. Moreover, instead of exporting greatness to Nicaragua and Vietnam, what *were* they exporting? The answer wasn't pretty.
There were the social changes. The 30-somethings in the 1970s and 1980s lost any fervor for sacrifice. The system was the system, to be milked: There was no real pride in being the USSR. The apparatchiki ruled and were cynical. Nobody wanted to defend the system. When it came out that they *did* have a suicide rate and plane crashes (all state secrets before), that the Stalin and Brezhnev eras had GULags and political repression, it was too much for many; some simply denied it, out of belief or expediency; others considered the problems to be overblown because they couldn't handle the humiliation entailed by them, and publicizing the flaws to be further humiliation. At the same time, many didn't see why some politically banned books were banned--it seemed silly and petty. The thing about a command economy is that it has to be commanded: when the commanders have no real authority, or use their authority for personal gain, things go corrupt and flaccid very quickly. The only recourse is to hide it, and that produces more economic corruption and less accountability. Once the commanders were held up to ridicule, they had no real authority to fix problems--mistakes could be accepted, but even the competent, once reduced to being ridiculed, can't do squat.
Afghanistan was part of it, but a late part, and just more of the same: Not only was the system not worth defending on moral grounds, it wasn't defending on purely nationalistic grounds. It couldn't beat the Taliban, which is to say, the US, even after having beaten the US to a draw or having simply won in Mozambique, Angola, Cuba, Nicagagua, Vietnam, Laos (we'll not mention the blowback of Cambodia) and numerous other countries, and keeping the US sidelined in the UN through alliances with the 'non-aligned' countries like India and Iraq and Egypt. But a second psychological blow was that the losses, and lack of victory, had been kept from them just as the Soviet economic backwardness, suicide rates, alcoholism problem, air crashes, etc., etc. had been kept secret. Reality turned out to be worse than the rumors made it out to be.
Military spending was also a big deal: The best had gone for the military and even the space program. They got their pick of things like ball bearings and batches of steel, making consumer goods even shoddier instead of improving quality across the board. As military spending had to rev up with a fairly static economic base, the military demanded a greater share of high-quality output. This became noticeable at the wrong time--when confidence in the system was badly shaken. Xozraschet made it obvious this was the case.
Xozraschet undermined things even more when the reports came out as to how inefficient everything was. When some enterprises were punished for being inefficient, it wasn't deemed fair, since the workers suffered. And with that the only real social contract left failed as production slowed, food became harder to find as work stopped being guaranteed. But, of course, there's more.
Going back to the '60s, there was affirmative action in the USSR. It was noticed that everybody important, pretty much, was Russian, or at least Slav. This changed, and more "ethnic minorities" were incorporated into more cadres. Russians, esp., didn't like this. The Ivans couldn't catch a break, and there was considerable backlash. It continues to this day--Rogozin, a noted spokesman for Russia during the Russo-Georgian conflict lead a "take out the trash" political campaign in '04 or '06 in which watermelon rinds figured prominently (mostly identified with the Caucasus). Think of a "drive out the cockroaches" campaign that showed trash from a taco stand for an American parallel (Rogozin was popular here when he echoed Putin).
Politically, Gorbachev was fairly popular, at least among those fairly young. At least he was trying to fix things when it was obvious the future wasn't going to be great. The generals and old guard didn't like it one bit, but were off guard. The coup attempt flopped, putting them back on their heels, but also making the country less stable--the USSR was no longer an ideal that a majority bought into, if it ever had been. Seeing the instability and weakness of the generals and old guard, and lack of resoluteness in the KPSS, the various "occupied countries" declared their de facto independence.
Gorbachev did nothing, simply because he wasn't able to do much: To invade would have undermined some of his stated precepts, to not invade undermined the USSR's "nationalistic" fervor. The army was even more weakened and divided, with no consensus or clear leadership; the economy probably couldn't take invading Georgia, much less Poland (he undoubtedly remembered 1917), and then the Soviet minorities felt it was safe to speak. The reaction was predictable--when Estonia or Lithuania finally declared independence after years of occupation, the Russian response was that they'd always been able to, what kept them from doing it in the '50s or '60s? (People were so stunned at the arrogance of the question that they forgot to laugh at the joke.) The generals were divided, and confronted with too many problems: The units in the breakaway areas were largely minority units (which weren't considered reliable enough to be placed in positions that would actually come under attack in the case of a NATO invasion ... i.e., in Europe). Moreover, not just breakaway republics had to be dealt with--breakaway autonomous republics were in the offing, and more serious ... and also a problem that couldn't be dealt with militarily, turning the Red Army on areas inside Russia proper.
Of course, this is all really, really simplified, with various other reasons left out. Declining agricultural output in some regions, vast tracts of polluted or unhabitable land, vast amounts of unexploitable wealth, an attempt to overreach by having subsidized settlements in land that was less than marginal, subsidies to political allies, a static population, the inflexibility of a command economy given rather rapid change, restrictions imposed by having an state-fixed overvalued currency, a preference for E. German, Polish, and Czech manufactured goods, etc., etc., all played some role.
People like nuance, but when confronted with a spate of causes or reasons demand just one because nuance and complexity are, well, hard to understand and complex. Then, when provided with just one, they're at pains to point out that the answer is simplistic and can't be right, often instead still wanting a single reason, just a different one. Then, when provided with more answers, they respond that they were lied to when given just one.
Did Reagan help in the USSR's collapse? Most assuredly: he stressed the economy, helped Afghanistan be a Soviet problem and drained Soviet resources in other US/USSR proxy wars and political confrontations, and he increased contacts, all the while showing the West to not be *just* militaristic warmongers. Could the "Reagan offensive" have been neutered by an economically more powerful and politically cohesive USSR? Most assuredly. Would the USSR have collapsed without the "Reagan offensive"? Most assuredly, but Amal'rik's 1984 half-serious prediction would have been even more wrong, and when it collapsed it might have collapsed in a more explosive way.
One enduring topic of debate is why the USSR collapsed so peacefully. It had a military, with the core being Russians. While it wasn't a finely honed fighting machine, it could have still prevented some breakaway republics from leaving and sown chaos in others. (Remember Budyonnyi? He couldn't keep Poland for Lenin, but he certainly created chaos.) I still haven't seen an answer that really satisfies me intellectually, the answer all seems to be nitpicking details concerning one aspect of the problem or another. All told, they simply say that nobody did anything, with each person having his own reasons, with no overarching reason (except negative ones--lack of consensus, incompetence with occasional flickers of morality, lack of centralized, respected authority, inaction on the part of political leaders, etc.). It's likely to be the real reason, but still it's something that isn't satisfying.
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