The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ) collapsed in the final years of the 1980s. This collapse of the Soviet Empire is related to the erosion of the communist model of government, implemented in Russia in 1917 and spread to other Eastern European countries in the following decades, especially during the period of totalitarianism Stalinist. The centralizing and coercive government of the USSR, starting in the 1970s, became incompatible with the reality of globalization and technological modernization presented by countries where democratic political culture and free market economy prevailed.
At the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s, the USSR found itself in the contingency of cutting spending on wars and promoting other countries where the communist model had settled, such as Cuba. The war in Afghanistan, a country deeply influenced by the Soviet communist power structure in the 1970s, exposed the USSR to great military weakness. Islamic resistance forces against the Afghan “sovietization” were armed and trained by the US, but they also began to receive military aid from China (which had broken with the USSR years before), which led the Soviet army to successive defeats.
It was in this atmosphere that there was a new election in the Soviet Communist Party , in 1985, in which he was elected as new leader Mikhail Gorbachev . Gorbachev was charged with promoting profound reforms in the structure of the Soviet state, in order to guarantee the regime's subsistence. However, such reforms, called Perestroika (reconstruction), whose mode of origin would be Glasnost (that is, transparency), ended up opening the way for the implosion of the communist regime. As historian Silvio Pons says in his book The Global Revolution – History of International Communism (1917-1991) :
“Gorbachev's reforms weakened this role [of guaranteeing the legitimacy of international communism], without building a credible and sustainable alternative. Its universalist relaunch revealed the loss of meaning of communism as a subject in the modern world. The decline of international communism, evident in the 1960s, thus revealed itself to be the premise and the announcement of a deep crisis, destined to accumulate problems of all kinds. It was fundamentally a crisis of legitimation of the states, the movement and the communist political culture.” [1]
Gorbachev carried out actions such as reducing aid to other communist countries (Cuba was one of the most affected) and withdrawing Soviet troops from the combat zone in Afghanistan (thus giving up of hegemony over that region). In addition, Gorbachev also took the initiative to enter into agreements with the United States for the joint destruction of a certain number of nuclear warheads, putting an end to one of the main features of the War Cold , the “arms race”.
There was also a fateful episode that took place on April 26, 1986:the accident with the atomic reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, which rendered the government of Gorbachev incalculable upheaval, in addition to revealing to the world the obsolescence Soviet technology. The difficulties in containing the nuclear leak left the European continent alarmed, which generated the need for external assistance, from the West, to solve the problem.
It is also important to point out that, at the same time that Gorbachev was carrying out such reforms and facing such problems, he was pressured by two sectors of the spheres of power in the USSR:the “line- dura”, commanded by Valentin Pavlov , and the sector considered liberalizing and progressive, led by Boris Yeltsin . Pavlov demanded of Gorbachev a tougher geopolitical stance and the maintenance of power centered around the bureaucrats of the Soviet Communist Party. On the other hand, Yeltsin advocated opening the USSR to the influence of Western democracies and to the market economy.
Amidst all this pressure, there was the first election for non-communist deputies in the Soviet Congress. The measures adopted by Gorbachev led those less open to change, represented by Pavlov, to an attempted coup against Gorbachev on August 18, 1991. Gorbachev was arrested, which sparked a popular uprising and a resistance movement led by Boris Yeltsin. . The putschists had to give in to the pressure, freeing Gorbachev, who returned to power, but resigned as the party's general secretary, but still held the position of president of the Soviet Union. As a result of the coup, many of the countries linked to the USSR began to declare their independence, which caused a rapid disintegration of the Soviet Empire.
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev finally resigned as president, thus acknowledging the failure of his reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From then on, the Community of Independent States was formed among former members of the Soviet republics. (CEI), which implemented the model of political representation according to its reality.
NOTES
[1] PONS, Silvio. The Global Revolution – history of international communism. (1917-1991) . trans. Luis Sergio Henriques. Rio de Janeiro:Counterpoint; Astrogildo Pereira Foundation, 2014. p. 553.