What Really Killed USSR? Too Much Talking

In 1946, George Orwell prophesized that "the Russian regime will either democratize itself or it will perish." Apart from a scant few predictions, many more lucky than prescient, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an unexpected geopolitical event.

Few Westerners and even fewer Soviets foresaw a complete disintegration of the communist bloc. The conditions for the collapse were diverse, but once they converged in the late 1980s, they attained overwhelming momentum. Of the many causes — among them economic stagnation, ecological catastrophe, declining government revenues and a crippling oil crisis, sluggish bureaucracy, nationalism in the outer ring of republics, censorship and dishonesty about the past — one supersedes the rest.

This was the introduction of glasnost, which legalized public discussion of problems. It is my view that greater freedom, not its absence, caused the Soviet Union to perish. Put simply, the big thing that killed the regime was that everybody was talking too much.

The myriad crises did not themselves cause the Soviet Union’s downfall. All Soviet problems, potent as they were, were subsumed to the fact that frank discussion about them was dangerous and illegal. While Leonid Brezhnev’s state did not murder nonconformists as Stalin’s had, exile, arrest or forced labor were hardly more appealing alternatives. Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to implement glasnost empowered the Soviet citizenry; in so doing it also released self-destructive energy.

“Openness”’ role in the superpower’s dissolution took on two primary forms: it allowed suppressed nationalism in the peripheral Soviet republics to explode into independence movements, and it constituted an abandonment of key Soviet norms without which the system weakened and died.

One of the most distinct aspects about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was the severity with which this domination was enforced. In 1953, 1956 and 1968 the Red Army harshly quelled revolts in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively. During the Cold War, Russian-based KGB operatives permeated throughout Soviet and Warsaw Pact states, and domestic agencies like Stasi and StB meticulously collected files on citizens. Mass surveillance, sudden arrest, interrogation and restriction of speech became commonplace in Eastern Europe.

The onset of glasnost presented Soviet and satellite states an opportunity to voice nationalist sentiment that had been quietly growing for decades. As peaceful — now legal — protest movements blossomed across Eastern Europe in the latter half of the 1980s, the Red Army was unable to suppress them. Had such nationalist eruptions occurred in the 1960s or 1970s, Brezhnev Doctrine would have swiftly put an end to the commotion. Gorbachev’s “openness” unleashed a tremendous current of separatism, which cost the Soviets their sphere in Eastern Europe, the Baltic, the Caucasus, and other regions. 

Glasnost also interfered with long-standing Soviet conventions, fatally so. For decades, Soviet media offices produced streams of propaganda that aimed, if not to wholly convince its audience, then to sufficiently blend truth, lies and exaggeration as to make the three indistinguishable. Soviet “censorship” meant much more than the suppression or alteration of statistical data. The entire relationship between citizen and government was sewn in a fabric of lies and deceit about historical fact, the outside world, culture and art, philosophy, even the personal lives of Soviet statesmen.

Censorship and autocracy go hand in hand; Soviet censorship, like Soviet authoritarianism, was an industrialized exaggeration of analogous practices in tsarist times. Stability, a promise made by both tsars and general secretaries, required the suppression of unbecoming facts that risked delegitimizing the leadership. Glasnost gave citizens the chance to question their government and its narrative. This proved an immense abandonment of Soviet (and Russian) tradition — tradition that had been a force for stability, albeit a perverse one. When Gorbachev chose to open the press, he was deserting an old tenet of Russian government. Unable to stand to scrutiny, his regime collapsed as its habitual screen was removed.

Had an orthodox communist come to power in 1985 — after all, Konstantin Chernenko’s short tenure was somewhat a throwback to Brezhnev’s—it is conceivable, even probable, that the system would have dragged on, slowly deteriorating. The status quo could have remained as it had been under Brezhnev, calm and sickly. Even with a reformist as general secretary, glasnost was by no means a foregone conclusion. Gorbachev originally implemented glasnost to enhance perestroika, guided by the belief that the latter could not be achieved without the former.

Yet the question of freeing the press was not inherently linked to the push for economic restructuring. While perestroika did require greater availability of economic and labor data, it did not require expansive social “openness.” Previously censored statistics were already becoming available during the short term of Yuri Andropov, who himself advocated a modest economic reform effort. Andropov’s consent to piecemeal systemic reform in no way indicated an inclination toward freedom of speech or expression (Andropov’s long career as KGB director informed this view). Had Andropov lived longer, the Soviet Union might have experienced gradual changes in economic policy, but almost certainly would have remained a repressive state.

It is arguable that some attempt at economic restructuring was an inevitability as the Soviet Union fell behind the West. “Openness” was not such an inevitability. During the same period, China’s regime chose the path of perestroika without glasnost, suppressing dissent but reorienting toward the market. The Chinese Communist Party remains in power today.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was in part the consequence of an unessential, perhaps arbitrary, policy decision. Orwell was right that democratization and Soviet collapse would be connected. What he didn’t predict was that democratization would cause Soviet collapse.