What Explains the Fall of the USSR, c1985–1991? - Historical Interpretations (Edexcel A Level History: Route E: Communist states in the twentieth century): Exam Questions

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Edward Acton and Tom Stableford, The Soviet Union Volume 2 1939–1991, published 2007.

The end of the Soviet Union was triggered by the new General Secretary appointed in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev. He changed the USSR's foreign policy. He attempted to accelerate industrial growth and later began to dismantle many of the structures of the command economy. He radically loosened the rigour of censorship and the scope for questioning the certainties of Marxism-Leninism. He instigated dramatic reform of the party and of the entire political system, introducing competitive elections both at the All-Union level and within each Republic. His confidence that the result would be the revitalisation of the Soviet Union proved gravely misplaced. The attempt to reform society from above unleashed forces for change which the government proved wholly unable to control. It undermined the economy, turning stagnation into steep decline. It ignited a cultural and ideological revolution that swiftly stripped the regime of its legitimacy and ruptured the Communist Party. It set off an explosion which ripped apart the Soviet system and fractured the country along the fault-lines of the fifteen constituent Union Republics. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for so long a major fixture in international relations, disappeared into history.

Extract 2: From Raymond Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, published 2002.

A complex interaction of overthrow from below – 'people power' – and collapse from above brought about the events of 1989 across the Soviet empire of Eastern Europe. This deadly combination of predominantly nationalist pressure and Soviet imperial withdrawal spread east to contaminate the USSR itself during 1990–91. Another major shortcoming was the Soviet Union's inefficient and wasteful economic performance. By the time Gorbachev was promoting ideas on the desirability and practicability of a mixed economy in the late 1980s, a doomed atmosphere of 'too little too late' hung over the commitment to perestroika. By its last decade, the sprawling, outdated and dysfunctional economy of the Soviet Empire could neither deliver the welfare state by fulfilling the economic and social expectations of its population nor supply the warfare state by satisfying the spiralling financial and technological demands of the Cold War. By 1990, financial bankruptcy ensured that the stricken Soviet Union could sustain neither role.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because Gorbachev's confidence in his reform policies 'proved gravely misplaced' (Extract 1, line 9)?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: From Earliest Times to the Present, 2nd edition, published 2012.

In 1990 Gorbachev loosened the electoral structure one stage further. He amended Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution to end the Communist Party's monopoly and legalised the formation of alternative political parties. At the time, elections to the Supreme Soviets of the union republics were imminent and these elections transformed the political scene yet again. For one thing, they fatally weakened the Communist Party's executive power: more or less since 1917 it had been the effective focus of state authority, coordinating and directing whatever was undertaken by public bodies. Its abdication of this function left a great vacuum at the centre of politics. Gorbachev attempted to fill it by creating the post of President of the USSR and having himself elected to it by the Congress of People's Deputies. But the new presidency had no real executive chain of command of its own. In any case, Gorbachev, never having been confirmed by popular election, lacked the legitimacy of, say, a US president. This lack of either symbolic or actual authority undermined him fatally over the next 18 months as economic crisis and inter-ethnic conflict engulfed his reform programme.

Extract 2: From Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991, published 2014.

Economically, perestroika had a lot in common with the NEP. It rested on the hopeful assumption that market mechanisms could be added to the structures of the planned economy to stimulate production and satisfy consumer needs. State controls on wages and prices were loosened by a 1987 Law on State Enterprises. Co-operatives were legalised in 1988, resulting in a NEP-like sprouting up of cafés, restaurants and small shops or kiosks, selling mostly vodka (now re-legalised), cigarettes and pornographic videos imported from abroad. But these measures failed to ease the shortages of food and essential household goods. Inflation increased, aggravated by the lifting of controls on wages and prices. Only the dismantling of the planned economy could have solved the crisis. But ideologically that was impossible until 1989, when Gorbachev began to break free from the Soviet way of thinking. Even then it was too radical for him to legislate until August 1990, when the 500-Day Plan for the transition to a market-based economy was at last introduced by the Supreme Soviet. But by then it was too late to halt the economic crash.

In light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because of the consequences of Gorbachev's political reforms.

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History, published 2013.

Yeltsin was building an independent power-base by appealing to ethnic Russian patriotism. In 1989 and 1990, nationalist demonstrations dominated the news. These demonstrations culminated in unilateral declarations of independence in the Baltic and armed uprisings in the Caucasus. Gorbachev's creation of a new post, President of the USSR, was intended to strengthen the Soviet Union and hold the republics together by giving them a single figurehead. However, spurred by the success of their neighbours in Eastern Europe, Soviet citizens increased their demands. Lithuania's campaign for independence was particularly vocal. Protesters in Moscow called on Gorbachev to 'Remember Romania!', linking him with the detested Ceausescu*, who had been executed following a popular uprising in December 1989. This was unfair, for it was Gorbachev who had unleashed the popular tide in Europe in the first place. In January 1991, Soviet troops moved into the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The demonstrations there were suppressed at the cost of fourteen lives. Thanks to Gorbachev's earlier reforms, the violence was televised and images of Soviet tanks loomed once again across Europe. President Gorbachev – and the Soviet Union – had lost the moral argument forever.

Ceausescu - ruler of communist Romania

Extract 2: From Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age, published 2014.

Gorbachev has been regarded by some as a 'weak' leader, or even a failure, because the country over which he presided – the Soviet Union – ceased to exist at the end of 1991. The USSR could have been held together for many more years had he not embarked on the liberalisation of the Soviet economy, the democratisation of the Soviet political system, and the transformation of Soviet foreign policy. The most dissatisfied Soviet nationalities – the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians – saw the peoples of Eastern Europe achieving independent statehood in 1989. This raised their aspirations from seeking greater freedom within a Soviet state to demanding full independence. Gorbachev consciously sought to prevent the dissolution of the Soviet state but he was not prepared to resort to the kind of sustained use of force that would have been required to crush independence movements once expectations were aroused. The fact that the Soviet Union was dissolved largely peacefully was in some ways an achievement on Gorbachev's part, although it was very much an unintended consequence of changes to the system. Most fundamentally, it was Gorbachev's liberalisation and democratisation that made the pursuit of independence possible.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because of a nationalist resurgence in the Soviet bloc?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, published 1992.

Reform of the Soviet economy in the mid-to-late 1980s faced formidable obstacles. First, ideologically, for many Soviet communist officials and citizens, free market thinking and socialism seemed completely incompatible. Ordinary citizens also saw private enterprise and trading for profit as a 'black market' activity. The masses were accustomed to, and valued, low-priced necessities and job security, but improved economic efficiency required a break with such practices. A second obstacle was the determination of many officials in the party-state machine to retain their function of allocating resources, which was a vital source of their power and privilege. Consequently, bureaucrats could and did obstruct change. A third obstacle was that millions of Soviet citizens had become accustomed to the old system and knew how to operate within it. Management was used to having their customers designated by central planning and had never had to advertise or promote their products. All this helps to explain the failure of economic perestroika. However, the government also made serious economic policy errors, which made a difficult task altogether impossible. Such errors included the 12th Five Year Plan, the failure to tackle the budget deficit that stood at nearly 100 billion roubles in 1989, and the reluctance to raise prices. The stage was set for disintegration.

Extract 2: From P. M. H. Bell, The World Since 1945: An International History, published 2001.

Gorbachev gambled everything on the reform of the Soviet system. He hoped that he could somehow introduce a socialist-style market economy without letting the market dominate, permit greater freedom to the nationalities without conceding independence, and delegate power in a centralised system without leading to disintegration. In 1990, it grew increasingly unlikely that he could succeed, as a threefold crisis developed within the Soviet Union – ideological, economic and nationalist. The decision to repeal Article 6 of the constitution and create the new post of President of the Soviet Union removed the directing role and political monopoly of the Soviet Communist Party. This change produced a profound ideological crisis regarding the purpose of communism but offered nothing to replace it. At the same time, the Soviet economy fell into actual decline, as gross national product contracted by between 2.4 per cent and 5 per cent. Finally, the nationalities' pursuit of independence or separation gathered pace in 1990. The areas most affected included the Baltic states, the Russian republic and the Ukraine. Gorbachev tried to hold the USSR together but, in practice, disintegration was setting in.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because Soviet economic reform 'faced formidable obstacles' (Extract 1, lines 1–2)?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, published 2010.

In the Soviet Union, reform produced crisis more than crisis forced reform. In 1985 neither the Soviet system nor the Soviet state were under threat. By 1989 both of them were. Gorbachev and his advisers wanted to dismantle the communist system but were strongly opposed to the breakup of the Soviet state. However, they were not prepared to sacrifice the liberalised and democratising political system in favour of the violent suppression of national separatism. Perestroika achieved a great deal. Fear of the state authorities was removed, liberty was introduced, competitive elections took place, and democratic accountability emerged in the USSR. It was no coincidence that these things happened shortly before the Soviet state itself ceased to exist. The task of holding together a democratised multinational state, in which each nation could point to a long list of grievances, was far harder than preserving the Soviet Union as a highly authoritarian state. Until the mid-1980s, it had been taken for granted that every demonstration of nationalism would be stamped out ruthlessly. It was when that ceased to be the case that expectations were raised and the Soviet state was called into question.

Extract 2: From Lee Edwards, The Collapse of Communism, published 2013.

Resolving Soviet economic stagnation could only have been accomplished by tampering with the system, which carried obvious risks. It was common knowledge in the 1980s that the Soviet economy was in deep trouble. The US Central Intelligence Agency forecast virtually zero growth for the USSR. Even within the Soviet Union voices were heard calling for major changes in the way the economy was run. A heavy and unanticipated blow was the sudden drop in the price of oil, the country's leading export and main currency earner. The decline in earnings from oil forced Moscow to resort to heavy borrowing from abroad. In addition, the Soviet government preferred to ignore the nationalist tensions within the USSR. Consequently, the Soviet leadership did nothing and things soon got out of hand. The moment the politicians of the non-Russian republics sensed that Soviet authority was wobbling, they began to clamour for national rights and independence. Gorbachev made a desperate attempt to preserve the Soviet Union by drafting a new constitutional charter granting concessions to the republics, but he was overtaken by events.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because 'reform produced crisis' [Extract 1, line 1]?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From David R Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–1991, published 2004.

Gorbachev's most important failure was not to reconcile the results of glasnost with the rise of the national question in the Soviet Union. Problems in the republics emerged almost immediately upon his taking office and were only increased by the more tolerant atmosphere within the media. In the Baltic states, there were widespread protests. Arguably Gorbachev could have negotiated the departure of the three Baltic states from the USSR and still maintained the union. His hesitation ensured that the initiatives of the Baltic leaders, and particularly the popular fronts, spread to the other republics. The rise in national sentiment in the republics received a significant boost from the downfall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the first instance, Gorbachev's abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine led to the overthrow of the obsolete communist governments in Poland and East Germany, which had almost no popular support. When the Soviet Union did not respond to stop the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet republics could act with more confidence.

Extract 2: From John Keep, A History of the Soviet Union 1945–1991, published 1995.

Gorbachev's miscalculations were so enormous that some contemporary observers thought they might be 'deliberate mistakes'. In other words, that he was following a secret agenda and was working to bring down the Soviet regime. First, he authorised the spending spree of 1985–86, which undermined the country's financial stability. The financial stability of the Soviet Union was already more seriously threatened than he realised since his predecessors had treated financial matters as top-secret. Second, he underestimated the seriousness of nationalist tensions within the Soviet Union which could not be easily resolved by the rational, common sense methods he applied. Third, although he believed that the socialist option was irreversible, he weakened the party machinery that embodied it. Finally, in 1990, he refused to endorse the programme of his adviser Shatalin for transition to a free market. All of these miscalculations were rooted in a failure to appreciate the true nature of the Soviet political system, which, being totalitarian, was held together ultimately by coercion and deceitful propaganda.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 because of the 'rise of the national question' [Extract 1, line 2]?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Richard Sakwa, Soviet Politics in Perspective, published 1998.

In its final years, the Soviet economy faced significant problems, including systematic difficulties arising from problems internal to the socialist economy, and which could be remedied by actions taken by the leadership itself. Most of the latter arose from the pattern of Stalinist super-industrialisation which created a vast top-heavy bureaucracy managing the country's economic life. At a certain stage, the enormous costs and wastage involved in maintaining the managing mechanism, the heart of the command economy, condemned Soviet-type economies to relative stagnation. In the absence of the invincible hand of capitalist market forces, and the increasingly palsied condition of the visible hand of command planning, such economies had no self-sustaining mechanism to imbue them with dynamism. These problems were not new, and the issue of economic reform had been at or near the top of the agenda at least since the death of Stalin.

Extract 2: From Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism, published 2004.

The Soviet administrative-command economy continued to have positive economic growth until 1989. The negative growth thereafter is indicative of an economic system in collapse. The party elite were reasonably satisfied, and the Soviet population was not in open opposition. The administrative command system, on the eve of its radical change, was inefficient but stable. Declining Soviet growth rate, coupled with the acceleration of growth in China, Southeast Asia, and the marked recovery of the U.S. economy, were troubling but do not fully explain the fateful steps that eventually spelled the demise of the system.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the USSR collapsed in 1991 primarily because of long-term weaknesses in the Soviet economy that pre-dated Gorbachev?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Jeremy Smith, The Fall of Soviet Communism, published 2005.

Many historians adopt the long-term view that the Soviet system, while successful in transforming the former Russian Empire into a powerful industrial state, contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Systemic weaknesses, a redundant ideology, internal contradictions, and the absence of the flexibility required to adapt to changing environments and challenges meant that, even if its collapse need not have occurred exactly when it did, it was ultimately inevitable.

Extract 2: From Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Era, published 2006.

While there had been an accumulation of problems over several decades, including a secular decline in the rate of economic growth and rising rates of infant mortality and alcoholism, there was no strong pressure from below for change in 1985. The dissident movement had been crushed and the atmosphere was primarily one of political apathy and fatalism. In Brezhnev's time there had been a lot of talk about the scientific and technological revolution, but technologically the Soviet Union was lagging far behind the advanced Western countries and not faring well in comparison with the newly industrialising countries of Asia. Moreover, the war in Afghanistan was proving costly and becoming increasingly unpopular. It was not so much a case of crisis forcing radical reform as of radical reform generating crisis.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that by 1985 the Soviet political system was beyond reform?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Anatoly M. Khazanov, After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, published 1995.

From the end of 1986, at the onset of the period of change, representatives of non-Russian peoples began to express in the press complaints about the Soviet nationality policy, specifically its abuses of non-Russian cultures. Estonian economists and reform-minded officials began to insist on economic and financial independence for their republics. In 1987, groups sprang into various republics to address social, cultural and ecological problems that were often connected with national interests of these people. Ecological movements were particularly active in Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Estonia and Moldova. In September and October 1987 in Armenia, the greens organised mass demonstrations, an uncommon phenomenon in the Soviet Union at the time. By 1988, the economic and political crisis of the Soviet Union began to be accompanied by an explosion of nationalism and tension in interethnic relations.

Extract 2: From Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, published 1993.

The Soviet state was already in a profoundly weakened condition. The Soviet Union had experienced not only years of political and economic stagnation but also a frustrating absence of able and stable leadership in the first half of the 1980s. Weakness in the centre had enabled the local ethnic and regional mafias within the Party-state apparatus to increase their power. In nearly every Transcaucasian and Central Asian republic, a series of purges (1985-1988) eliminated the top leaders, although not without resistance. In Kazakhstan, the removal of long-time party Chief Dinmukhammed Kunaev and his replacement by a Russian brought demonstrators onto the streets. When these 'democratic' forces began to act, the emergence of nationalistic politics burst the bounds of old politics in a number of republics.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the rise of nationalism in the non-Russian republics was the most important reason for the collapse of the USSR?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, published 2006.

Boris Yeltsin came to be the standard-bearer of reformists. He had been dropped from the top leadership of the party and had openly clashed with the conservative Yegor Ligachev. These facts have contributed to his growing popularity. In March 1991, his conservative opponents attempted to get rid of him as head of the elected Russian parliament. He outmanoeuvred them by creating the Office of the President of the Russian Republic and stood for election to the presidency of Russia in June 1991. For Yeltsin, the presidency of Russia became a power base. Under Yeltsin's leadership, Russia began to act independently of the Soviet government, behaving as if Russia was really just one of the republics. This development, more than any other, led to the dissolution of the Union.

Extract 2: From George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders, published 2002.

In 1985, the Soviet Union appeared to be an entrenched entity, capable of defending itself against all challenges to the Communist Party's right to rule at home and in Eastern Europe, and determinedly pursued a policy of great-power competition abroad. By the end of 1991, an oppositional figure had been elected president of Russia. Both Communism and the Soviet Union had collapsed, and independent Russia had emerged as a seemingly helpless supplicant of the West. Without presupposing that Gorbachev and Yeltsin made all these things happen, it is fair to say that things would have happened quite differently had different individuals been in charge. Their acts of leadership were crucial. Khrushchev's reformism and Brezhnev's conservatism had long pedigrees within Soviet history, as did Gorbachev's initial strategy of reformism during 1985-1987, but Gorbachev's subsequent decision to push the transformation of the system and Yeltsin's decision to try to destroy and replace the Leninist system were unprecedented acts.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that Russian nationalism did more than the nationalism of the other republics to destroy the Soviet Union?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, published 1994.

At the same time that the administration was working to exploit the geopolitical cracks in the Soviet Bloc, it was effectively exacerbating the Soviet resource crisis. The American defence build-up is a case in point. The immediate purpose was to enhance deterrence, but the administration also had a much more fundamental objective. As spelled out in the Department of Defence Five-Year Planning Directive, the build-up was designed not only to raise the relative military strength of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union but also to contribute to the absolute decline in Soviet economic power. It was a form of economic warfare. The build-up was not simply about larger budgets. How the funds were spent was equally important. The commitment to high-tech advanced weapons (including SDI) suddenly injected what for Moscow was a dangerous dynamic into the arms competition. Moscow was at a drastic disadvantage and proved to be not up to the task. It was for this reason that Gorbachev possessed such an overarching fear of SDI and other American high-tech defence programs.

Extract 2: From Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, published 2007.

In 1985, expenditures to develop the new wells to support yields on active wells combined with a lack of resources led to a fall in production of 12 million tonnes in the USSR. At the same time, the slow decrease in real cost of oil, which began in 1981-1984 after the decision of Saudi Arabia to more than triple production, met with the unprecedented collapse in prices. In 1985-1986, prices on resources that supported the Soviet budgets, its foreign trade balance, the stability of its consumer market, as well as its ability to buy tens of millions of tonnes of grain a year, to service its foreign debt and to finance the army-military-industrial complex fell several fold. These problems did not cause the collapse of the socialist system that had been preordained by the fundamental characteristics of Soviet economy and political system. The legacy of socialist industrialisation, an ominous defence load, extreme crises in agriculture and non-competitive manufacturing sector made the fall of the regime inevitable.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that pressures from outside the USSR were decisive in bringing about its collapse?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.

Study Extracts 1 and 2 before you answer this question.

Extract 1: From Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, published 2006.

On August 19th, 1991, the premier, the vice president, and the head of the KGB, among others, all Gorbachev appointees, formed a 'State Committee on the State of Emergency', which assumed all governmental powers, banned strikes and demonstrations, and introduced censorship. That is to say, they staged a coup d'état. The conspirators were ludicrously inept, lacking both charisma and political sense. Beyond a dislike of Gorbachev's reforms and a desire for a return to the defunct Soviet order, they had no political program. Worst of all, from their point of view, they took no serious measures to disarm the opposition. The putschists accomplished the opposite of what they had intended: by their actions, they demonstrated that there was no force behind them, and that the old order could not be reconstructed. Their press conference, in which they allowed themselves to be ridiculed and showed themselves to be helpless, drunken, and fearful men, was a demonstration of the bankruptcy of the old order. Although the regime managed to hang on for four more months, this ill-considered conspiracy was the real end of the Soviet era.

Extract 2: From Martin McCauley, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, published 2008.

Had Yeltsin and his aides been arrested on the first day of the coup, it would probably have succeeded. KGB officers watched him leave his dacha but did not arrest him because they had not been given a written order to do so. Yeltsin was a brilliant populist and knew how to arouse passions. He was astute enough to demand the return of Gorbachev. He avoided the impression of going for power himself. The legal, constitutional norms had to be observed. The coup was anti-Russian as the Committee wanted to force Russia back into the old Soviet Union. This message struck a responsive chord among the intelligentsia. They knew that their lives would be blighted if the Committee secured power. Many workers were indifferent. Things had been going from bad to worse in the late Gorbachev era. Why should they suddenly improve if the leader came back? Yeltsin's answer was that we Russians can do it, if we are permitted to. Let us regenerate Russia together.

In the light of differing interpretations, how convincing do you find the view that the August coup of 1991, rather than any longer-term factor, determined the end of the Soviet Union?

To explain your answer, analyse and evaluate the material in both extracts, using your own knowledge of the issues.