The collapse of the USSR began during the 1970s and more strongly during the 1980s, starting with the doubt that settled within the Soviet elite, the Nomenklatura. The various episodes of dissident Soviets and samizdats (written under the cloak), also proceeded at the beginning of the end of the USSR.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Zinoniev, Alexander Ginsburg, Andrei Sakharov and so many others made other voices heard, in the USSR but above all abroad, and little by little the curtain began to tear. But the first work to throw the first paving stones in the pond was the work of Viktor Kravchenko, I chose freedom, published in 1947, far too early, because two years after the end of World War II, no one wanted to hear a dissenting voice from one of the winners of the war, the USSR.
Within power, there were those who wanted to keep the Soviet Union as it was, without wanting to understand that the sand in the hourglass was running out. Others were more realistic, and understood that it was necessary to anticipate things.
Long before Mikhail Gorbachev, a man knew the tide was turning, the powerful boss of the Soviet security, intelligence and counterintelligence services, the KGB (Комитет государственной безопасности), Yuri Andropov. Andropov, before he succeeded Leonid Brezhnev, had obtained numerous studies and data proving that the Soviet Union did not have it for very long.
So Andropov had launched in great secrecy a reform plan ensuring the future of his service, the KGB, that is to say a projection in the future of this organization, let us not forget that the current president of Russia, Vladimir Poutin, was a senior KGB officer who experienced these “reforms” …
It is evident that the daily life of the Soviets had changed a lot since Stalin’s death in 1953. Over three decades, it was still evident that one still could not oppose the regime, let alone make it known. But, if the Russian countryside was lagging behind, city life had changed a lot, had modernized, despite the absence of consumer goods, but in the Russian tradition of the “Potemkin village”, the USSR was a “village Potemkin “alone.
The Russian army, the Red Army, retained its power, but had suffered a huge defeat in Afghanistan. The economy, industry, everything that depended on Soviet power and of which the latter outlined by the famous five-year plans, the 70s and 80s showed the inefficiency of the system.
A Russian joke at the time showed Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev on a train. The train not leaving, Lenin had gone to the locomotive, shooting the counter-revolutionaries, assuring that the train was going to leave, but the train did not leave. Ditto for Stalin shooting the Trotskyists, but nothing. Ditto for Khrushchev rehabilitating everyone, but still nothing. Finally Brezhnev remaining seated, declared, “Let’s pretend we’re rolling”. Russian humor has always portrayed the reality of the country very well.
What also shook the system was the collapse of oil prices in 1986, here the USSR saw the possibility of having regular incomes fade away, and accentuated the slowdown in the economy. But we must not forget the corruption that was rife and of which the Brezhnev era had accentuated the phenomenon.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (CCCP, Союз Советских Социалистических Республик) was made up of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or 15 republics whose only unity was the control of central power in Moscow.
The Caucasus region which, already under the Tsar, gave Russia a hard time, this region began again under the USSR to give the Kremlin a cold sweat, from the end of the 1970s with Georgia, at the end of the 1980s with Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijan from 1990, then the question of Chechnya in 1991.
From the beginning of these 90s, the Baltic countries, too, will follow the example of the Caucasus by declaring their independence which will be effective for the former Soviet republics in 1991. Finally, if it was necessary to “find” the signal of the end the USSR, no doubt, it would be the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, April 26, 1986. And at the beginning of January 2022, 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union , Russia remains the largest country in the world, and will celebrate the Russian Orthodox New Year on Friday, January 14. As our guest Vladimir Fédorovski wished us, as well “Happy New Year!” in Russian, S’Novim Godom (С Новым годом!).