Past successes

Despite trailing the West economically, the USSR surpassed Western nations in several areas (winning the space race in the 1950s, securing the most Olympic medals, etc.). A major source of pride was the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, which had previously defeated the combined forces of the French and British empires. Thus, when the economic situation deteriorated in the 1980s, the leadership did not interpret it as proof of socialism’s inherent inferiority. Instead, the problems were attributed to excessive mid-level bureaucracy which the government decided to fix by shifting more control to the people on the ground. To aid the people make informed decisions and expose various misdeeds of mid-level bureaucrats, the leadership introduced new “glasnost” policies that relaxed media censorship and restrictions on freedom of debate.

By the 1980s, Communist rule in Russia had been in place for seven decades. The new party leaders, having grown up without witnessing any significant opposition to the regime, were taken aback when the newly granted freedoms were used to challenge the very concept of Communist Party rule or to demand national independence in regions with a non-Russian majority. Following a period of internal deliberation on whether to placate the populace with additional concessions or to backtrack on the reforms, the party leaders eventually opted for the latter. However, this decision was made too late to salvage the regime.

The fate of the USSR stands in stark contrast to contemporary communist regimes in China and North Korea. Both countries were significantly less developed than the USSR, let alone the Western nations. Each also had a capitalist counterpart, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and South Korea, where the populations enjoyed substantially higher living standards. Given the more apparent disadvantages of the socialist system in these countries compared to the USSR, the local communist leaders were under no illusions about the necessity to maintain media censorship and permanently quash all political dissent.