What caused the soviet union to abandon communism?

perplexed

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Some people say that the US won the cold war with russia by forcing it into an arms race that bankrupted it. I think this was a factor but I would think that larger factor was the will of the russian people and leaders that were willing to follow the will of the people. The reason I think this is that North Korea has a worse economy than russia had but it is still communist.
 

Agrippa

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One reason, seldom mentioned, is the 'Lost Generation' of the Second World War. Like Iran today, young people made up a larger than normal percentage of the population and they provided some of the impetus for reform. This is a minor cause, true, but it is one that deserves to be stated.
 
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Injured Soldier

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Agrippa said:
One reason, seldom mentioned, is the 'Lost Generation' of the Second World War. Like Iran today, young people made up a larger than normal percentage of the population and they provided some of the impetus for reform. This is a minor cause, true, but it is one that deserves to be stated.

Considering Gorbachev was the younger Politburo member at the time of his appointment there might be something to that. Ironic thing was Reagan was the oldest US president. :p

We have to remember Gorbachev's policies too......as well as his failed ones. They revealed cracks in the communist state.
 
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Koba The Dread

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In my opinion there are more pertinent reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union other than Reagan singlehandedly destroying it or the arms race although competition with the capitalist system certainly was an important factor.

After Stalin's death many bourgeois and pseudo-marxists emerged within the party and reforms of the socialist system took place, beginning the return to capitalism. Evidence of this is the growth of milionaires in the Soviet Union during the Kruschev era and of course the final blow was Gorbachev with his glasnost and Perestroika policies, however the Soviet Union was already heavily 'pro-capitalist' at this stage...
 
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SolomonVII

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Poland and the solidarity movement had a alrge psychological effect. Communism always portrayed itself as the cause of the workers. When it was the workers of Poland that led the revolt against the communist regimes, the huge gap between communist reality and communist ideals was exposed.
 
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SolomonVII

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The Stalinist state was not capitalist. It was entirely inspired by Marxist ideals. Coupled with contempt for capitalists, bourgoise, Christian and other religious values, it was a Marxist ideal that went horribly wrong, but it was Marxist nevertheless, through and through.

If Russia was not a communist state, it was not just due to the fact that no state coud in reality ever be a communist state. Marxist utopian nirvana of the proletariat, with its fundamental lack of understanding of human nature, could never aspire to be anything more than a pipe dream after all, the opiate of the ivory tower intellgensia.
 
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SolomonVII

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...and while it may still well be the pipe dream of many still that teach in the ivory towers of may of our own western universities, Lech Walesa and other members of the proletariat know all too well about the hellish reality where Marxist ideology inevitably led them to.
 
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Relevance

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Russia was state capitalist. Period. It was never Communist. All Stalin did was develop capitalism, albeit through state control. Leninism is not real Marxism. Lenin just cut and pasted certain aspects of Marxism into his own theories, which included the idea of a vanguard and democratic centralism, both flawed and unMarxist ideas.

Human nature? And what would that be? That people are "naturally" greedy? That's garbage. And selfishness is not against the realization of Communism. For people to be willing to work to realize Communism, they must know that it will benefit them. It's not about altruism. If an individual does not think the realization of Communism will benefit him/her, why the hell would he/she work to achieve it? In this way, Communism and "selfishness" go together. Human nature is garbage made up by capitalists to convince people that this is "as good as it gets," that change is not possible.
 
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T

the_cheat

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solomon said:
The Stalinist state was not capitalist. It was entirely inspired by Marxist ideals. Coupled with contempt for capitalists, bourgoise, Christian and other religious values, it was a Marxist ideal that went horribly wrong, but it was Marxist nevertheless, through and through.

At the risk of being a jerk here, have you read Marx and Lenin? Lenin was very aware that the Communist Manifesto didn't apply to Russia, and sure didn't apply to the rest of the Russian Empire, as Russia had basically no proletariat, since it wasn't industrialized, and the outlying regions were full of nomadic tribal structures. He had to adapt Marxist theory to make it apply to the Russian Empire. Marxism-Leninism is a very different beast from classical Marxism.
 
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SolomonVII

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Mao and Lenin adapted Marxist ideology to their own situations.

Yea, Marx figured that it would have been Germany that was ripe for revolution, but his pipe dream didn't pan out there either.

Perpetual revolution becomes best expressed not through class warfar and revolution, but through a sytem of checks and balances, and institutional divison of powers.
 
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RedViper

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perplexed said:
Some people say that the US won the cold war with russia by forcing it into an arms race that bankrupted it. I think this was a factor but I would think that larger factor was the will of the russian people and leaders that were willing to follow the will of the people. The reason I think this is that North Korea has a worse economy than russia had but it is still communist.

I would say that the USSR (it was never communist) crumbled due to internal factors rather than external. The internal antagonisms where to great, it could not hold together.

the_cheat said:
:scratch: Just because something is not capitalist doesn't make it Marxist.

Indeed! But I would actually say that it was capitalist. The USSR was not liberal in any way, nor was it a market economy. But liberalism and market economy are not the same thing as capitalism (that becomes even more clear if we trace its origins back...they are not even of the same age) even though they often have co-existed. Capitalism is (to simplify) commodity production plus wage labour.

Wage labour did in fact (as we know) exist in the USSR, and the USSR was essentially based on capitalist commodity-production. However as a consequence of the historical form of forced transition to capitalism there was dislocation between the capitalist nature of production and its appearance as a society based on commodity-exchange. This dislocation led to the deformation of value and the defective content of use-values that both provided the basis for the persistence of the distinctly non-capitalist features of the USSR and led to the ultimate decline and disintegration of the USSR.
 
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SolomonVII

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the_cheat said:
:scratch: Just because something is not capitalist doesn't make it Marxist.

People that were agreeing with you were stating that it was capitalist. Since you were responding to me, I was interested to see how you would respond to them too.

Nevertheless, the makings of the Soviet state were inspired by Marxist ideology. Lenin was well within the Marxist idological political camp.
As far as I know, Marxisxm was studied in their schools there, it was advocated as the offiicial position, it was the language of the comrades;
the capitalism of the west was railed against, opposition and resulting persecution of religion as the opiate of the asses was believed in, churches filled with grain tp make them useful, the elites disposed of at the hands of the proletariat, etc., etc, etc,...

No, in a very real sense the Soviet Union was Marxist. To say otherwise, without qualification anyway, smacks of historical revisionism.

But really, I would be more interested in you responding to those that are saying that the Soviet Union was capitalist.:)
 
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