Quote from: RE on Jan 06, 2025, 12:20 AMEventually, they were outmaneuvered economically...
RE
Not exactly.
Quoteit was triggered by the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies. In 1987 Gorbachev turned his back on the reform course initiated by Yuri Andropov,the path Gorbachev himself had followed for two years. He took up new policies that replicated in an extreme way the Khrushchev policies of 1953-64 and even further back, the ideas espoused by Bukharin in the 1920s. Gorbachev's about-face was made possible by the growth of the second economy that provided a social basis for anti-socialist consciousness.
Gorbachev's revisionism routed its opponents and went on to discard essential tenets of Marxism-Leninism: class struggle, the leading role of the Party, international solidarity, and the primacy of collective ownership and planning. Soviet foreign policy retreats and the evisceration of the CPSU soon resulted. The latter process occurred with the Party's surrender of the mass media, the unraveling of central planning mechanisms and resulting economic decline, and the end of the Party's role in harmonizing the constituent nations of the USSR. Mass discontent enabled the Yeltsin anti-Communist "democrats" to capture control of the giant Russian Republic, and to begin to impose capitalism there. Separatists won out in the non-Russian republics. The USSR fell apart.