Could The Soviet Union Have Been Saved?

Samuel Bendett, National Interest: Could the Soviet Union Have Survived into the 21st Century?

The “what if” discussions about the end of the Soviet Union are still reverberating across Russia.

The breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was arguably one of the most pivotal and surprising events of the twentieth century. What seemed like a sudden end of the Cold War ushered in a new world, along with new challenges and opportunities. Despite a nearly year-and-a-half process that led to the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, the end of the mighty Communist superpower still caught many by surprise—in the United States and across Soviet Union itself. To Russian President Vladimir Putin, the end of the Soviet Union was a “major geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.”

But was the breakup of the Soviet Union really inevitable? It is common knowledge today that indeed, by the end of 1991, there was no way to preserve USSR as it existed for decades after 1922. According to today’s prevailing attitudes, the political, economic and socio-cultural processes brewing in the country since 1986 eventually tore the nation part, and the relatively quick end of the largest country on the planet was more preferable to any alternatives. However, there were attempts made by the Soviet government to extend the life of their country by changing specific aspects of how it could be governed.

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WNU Editor: In hindsight .... if free market economic reforms and liberalisations coupled with the adoption of a truly federated state (like Canada's) were implemented in the early 1980s .... parts of the Soviet Union may have survived. As for the other parts .... nationalist sentiments were on the rise, and short of a major and massive crackdown .... I personally fail to see how Moscow could have kept the entire Union together. But this is all moot .... the proper economic and political reforms were never implemented, nationalist forces and sentiments took over in every Soviet Republic that undermined Soviet authority (Russia included), and what little moral authority that Moscow had vanished with the Afghan war and how the Chernobyl disaster was handled.