Vanity - What were the economic reasons for the Soviet Collapse?

[VeniVidiVici]

The ruble was inconvertable and they could have simply inflated as they had in the past.

Why? There was still nothing to buy.

Economics had some to do with it but was not the driving force that actually overthrew the government. Somebody mentioned Walesa and I agree that's where it started.

Fact is the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was unraveling the Warsaw Pact in 1989. By August 1989 some of the old Soviet guard decided enough was enough and something had to be done before the storm hit the USSR. So they staged a coup to oust Gorbachev and install a government more "traditional".

The funny part was they used all the same boilerplate words and deeds their client state banana republics used whenever they staged a coup. As a result, from the beginning nobody ever believed Gorbachev was "ill".

The coup itself was staged by two legs of the Soviet triad: The KGB and the CPSU. There were always three so two could beat back an attack by one. The third leg was the military.

The military was never in this game. The plan to defeat "reactionary forces" in Moscow was to involve KGB troops and Special Forces. A parade division, populated by loyal troops, was really the only conventional unit tasked to support the defenders. In the end, they hardly mattered. The coup leaders were supposedly calling the Army for help but very few commanders took the bait. They finally got a commitment for some Airborne units to deploy to Moscow but they never arrived. Troops in garrison could be controlled. Troops moving down the road are subject to "external forces"

[screaminsunshine]

Already here.

[aberaussie]

Bttt

[bert]

They gave stuff away. They sold weapons, their only export of consequence, on credit. They accepted IOU’s rather than cash.

Their banks took the notes as collateral for payroll and operating expense loans to the factories making the weapons .

They did not know how to run a business and did not know the most important part of the transaction........ getting paid

[Katya]

There was a domino effect taking place, which began with Reagan’s Tear Down This wall speech...it started before the Berlin Wall fell in 89. First Hungary and then Czechoslovakia stopped enforcing border crossings from people leaving East Germany and crossing over into Germany. There was a slow and building exodus, especially of young people.

Coupled with the low price of crude... there was no stopping the pending collapse.

[TexasRepublic]

Socialism ignores human nature and is therefore fatally flawed. It kills incentives to work and produce. Why should a person work hard to become a doctor when he won’t be paid any more than a janitor? Why maintain any kind of property if you can’t own it? How can you make the correct decisions if arrogance and the party line blind you? The Soviets tried to compete with us, and we spent them under the table.

[SunkenCiv]

Marxism is a denial of reality that serves as the propaganda and supporting myth for a single-party police state dictatorship, brutally ruled by force and the threat of force. As the old joke goes, it definitely works, but not indefinitely.