In the years following the Russian revolution,occurred in 1917, there was the progressive formation of the "Soviet Empire", that is, the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(USSR) – an association between communist countries of Eastern Europe, which were articulated around a central power, whose headquarters were in Russia. The USSR lasted about 70 years and lived through the period of the so-called WarCold (started after theSecond World War, at the end of the 1940s), which consisted of the geopolitical and technological dispute between two socioeconomic systems: communism, which had the USSR as main representative, and the market economy (or capitalism), represented by Western democracies, especially the United States of America. THE doomof the USSR occurred in the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s.
We can say that the history of end of the Soviet Union, in other words, is the story of bankruptcy of the communist system. The revolution carried out by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 and the consolidation of the Soviet Empire with Stalin they needed the erecting of a centralizing and authoritarian State, which oppressed individuals and deprived them of of freedom of expression and free thought, in an attempt to make them “adjusted” to the worldview communist. The authoritarian state forged in the USSR was modeled on the communist ideas developed by German intellectuals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who said that a society without social classes, without private property and without hierarchical control of the means of production was possible. (industry). This model, applied in Russia and later in other neighboring countries, became, over time, unsustainable.
The most obvious signs of this collapse of communism began to appear in the 1970s. However, it was only in the 1980s that the Soviets admitted to the entire world that the USSR system needed reform. In 1985, MikhailGorbachev he was elected president of the USSR and general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev's mission was to renew Soviet communism without altering its essence. However, his reforms, known as “Perestroika” and “Glasnost”, did not have the expected effect. On the contrary, they accelerated the end of the current system.
Gorbachev had to face major problems, such as the explosion of the atomic reactor at the nuclear plant in the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl in 1986 (Ukraine was one of the countries that made up the USSR) and the war in Afghanistan (which was a communist republic to at the time aided by the USSR), from which he had to withdraw the Soviet troops due to the high expenses that the conflict demanded. Associated with this, there was, on the one hand, political pressure from the more traditional sectors within the BrokenCommunist, commanded by Valentin Pavlov, and, on the other, pressure from the most progressive sectors – the latter were led by borisYeltsin, which also contributed to the end of the USSR.
1991 was a decisive year for the fall of the Soviet regime. In August, Gorbachev suffered a coup d'état and was eventually arrested by representatives of the sectors of the Communist Party interested in maintaining the authoritarian character of the USSR. This coup sparked a wave of popular uprisings that resulted in the leader's release. Gorbachev, however, resigned as the party's general secretary, remaining only as president. until October of the same year, when, finally, he also resigned from this post, putting an end to the old structure of the USSR
See what historian Silvio Pons says: […] At the end of 1991, at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Gorbachev left the scene like a defeated politician. In his defeat, despite everything, there was an undeniable fact: what also left the scene were the most backward and most fraught with catastrophic consequences, which his policy had put out of the picture. Gorbachev's political initiative neither changed the system nor renewed communism. Even so, it rendered its extreme defense meaningless.. [1]
Communism could no longer be legitimized or reworked after the end of the USSR. An “extreme defense” of this system only continued to be made in countries where communist authoritarianism was already more deeply rooted than in the USSR itself – as was the case in China and North Korea.
GRADES
[1] PONS, Silvio. The Global Revolution – history of international communism. (1917-1991). trans. Luís Sérgio Henriques. Rio de Janeiro: Counterpoint; Astrogildo Pereira Foundation, 2014. P. 551
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
