Why Did the USSR Collapse?

5.1 Is the collapse of the USSR more attributable to personality, institutional or structural features?

I think the collapse of the USSR was attributable to all three of the features: personality, institutional, and structural. Presuming that Mikhail Gorbachev is the person referred to in the first regard, I think it's fair to say that his personality played an essential role in the country's collapse, although obviously it's more difficult to say whether the dismantling of the Soviet state was by design or an unintended consequence of reform. Here, the readings for the week offer a range of viewpoints. David Marples's analysis is particularly useful in pointing out how, on the one hand, Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the party into the elite with the paradoxical effect that "Neither workers, nor peasants, nor the intellectual elite accepted him as one of their own."[1] While such a characterization might initially seem to constitute a handicap, I rather think the lack of personal connections allowed Gorbachev to have a sort of maneuverability that a leader more attached to the party (e.g., Brezhnev) or to the workers and peasants (e.g., Khrushchev) might not have had. At those times where the wisdom of Gorbachev's decisions faltered (such as in the Lithuanian crisis early in 1991), he was probably saved more by luck than ability, but outside of the last year of his tenure, I don't think was the overarching style of Gorbachev's leadership.

Regarding institutional features, the diminishing role of the party probably plays the most important role. Here, in ultimately excluding the party from an exclusive role as the single guiding party of the system, Gorbachev delivered a coup de grace to a system that had been deteriorating over at least two decades. As Alexander Dallin points out, although the party grew to a heavily bureaucratized state with deeply entrenched control by the dawn of the Brezhnev era, the stagnation of that era resulted in a fundamental disconnect between the people and the party, made worse by rampant corruption. When the glasnost policy brought all of these problems out into the open, Dallin writes, "all this brought about a remarkable sense of having been lied to, of having been deprived of what the rest of the world had had access to […] a transformation of the Communist Party from the unchallenged clan of privilege to a hollow institution without a rational task other than self-preservations."[2] With glasnost in place, there could not help but be a vicious cycle of openness evoking party delegitimization evoking more openness, etc. Without the guiding hand of the party over the party state, the state could not but help but dissolve.

Finally, the structural features are most complex of all, involving both the rise of nationalism and the dissolution of totalitarianism. On the former point, a two-faced minorities policy that for decades had preached local self-determination but practiced aggressive Russification could not have helped but fuel nationalism, everything we know about nationalism considered. Regarding the latter point, I found Rasma Karklins's essay most helpful. As she notes, "If one links the totalitarian model's assumptions about the significance of the party's ideological and media monopolies to a dynamic concept of political culture, the erosion of these monopolies reveals itself as even more of a systemic change."[3] Karklins is clear that the roles of personality, ideology, and institutions are interrelated in her essay, so she bears in mind Gorbachev's role of instituting democratization "from above" and his dilution of the party's key role. Overall, I found her analysis to be the most incisive.

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[1] David R. Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985-1991 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 103.
[2] Alexander Dallin, "Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union," Post-Soviet Affairs, 8, no. 4 (1992): 298.
[3] Rasma Karklins, "Explaining Regime Change in the Soviet Union," Europe-Asia Studies, 46, no. 1 (1994): 34.