Collapse of Soviet Union

[Jano]

There are quite a lot of interesting things I've heard about collapse of Soviet Union. They all come from recent conversations with two men (both were one way or another closely connected to Moscow during 1980s, one of them was quite high in the food chain), so no provable facts, just their opinions and their personal experiences. Any links, opinions, facts proving those statements wrong or true are very welcome.

The "collapse" started in 1983/1984 when some kind of committee working under or closely related to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow presented the analysis of SU economy. It showed that more than 80% of economy was serving/working for military industry and less than 20% is acting in other economic fields, so the term "conversion" was introduced. That's what also put start to glasnost and perestroika.

One rule of all renewals/reforms was that they would first be implemented in one of the Slavic Republics (Ukraine, Belarus). Self management ideas were also first tried in Belarus, but as they didn't work out there, they were brought to Baltic States (idea about Self Managing Estonia is considered to be one of the first steps toward independence here in Estonia - another scattered illusion). There was some kind of "learning from the experiences of the Soviet republics" committee, which actual main assignment was to find the way to redesign Soviet Union. One of the most interesting things I heard was the SU Army's muslim problem - no matter how you place the conscripts, muslims always formed more than 50%, this was considered as a threat to morale, etc and seen as a serious important problem. So somewhere towards the end of eighties there came an idea to dismantle the SU and rebuild it, but under different terms, terms set by mother Russia (terms set in the way to control specially the muslim states and Azerbaijan was seen as the biggest problem). Thoughts were something like, they can't make it on their own without mother Russia, so they'll come back crawling and accept whatever Russia proposes.

What shocked me the most was, that they both backed up a theory (which I had heard before but discarded as a conspiracy theory) that the freedom movements ("Peoples front" was the name in Estonia) were actually organized by KGB - in order to maintain control over masses and to guide their thinking/ideas, once again, to renew the Soviet Union.

Also quite interesting thing I had heard before but now it rose up again - about the attempted coup in Moscow in August 1991 - this was just a political game allowing Yeltsin to appear as a saviour, and come to power itself and to play Gorbachev out.

Jano

[Homer martin]

There where signs even in the mid 70s that the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapsing. These signs where not read by the west or the Soviet government until long after the fall of the government. In the mid 70's the U.S. sold the Soviet Union millions of tons of grain to feed the people, as there was a large short fall in grain production for two years in the Soviet Union. The shipped grain was in the process of being stored when the price of grain shy rocketed, due to a shortage world wide of grain. The Soviet Union then took this grain and sold it on the world market, due to an acute need for money to feed the colossal war machine it had build. The Soviet Union's economy was build around the war machine, there was a large vacuum of personal needs that had to be filled by other countries, like Turkey, Japan, Finland, China and many others. When Gold started to shy rocket in the 70's the Soviet Union started to sell off its gold reserves, as gold moved up in the price the government kept selling more and more of its gold, when gold went over 800.00 an ounce the Soviet Union started to sell gold in bulk which in turn drove the price of gold down. This money from the gold sells kept the government stable until the mid 80s.

/hgm

[Lord Gort]

This is all very interesting, anyone got anything else to add to this>?

[Javier Acuña]

This is my interpretation:

SU collapsed because it was a technocratic government. When the results didn't matched the expectations, both from the people and the technocrats, the system collapsed, because a technocratic regime that doesn't fulfill its expectations has no sense, it's like a pocket calculator that does not calculates.

I hope it's not too incorrect.

[Sokol]

Unless there were 150 million Muslims in the SU, I don't see how more than 50% of conscripts could have been Muslim, frankly. Perhaps you can show me some verification for this information?