Now Playing
Afghanistan, Grain Queues, and a Military Bill Nobody Could Pay
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Soviet command economy couldn't feed Siberia, couldn't fix its own failures, and couldn't afford the arms race — and then came Afghanistan. This episode follows the structural rot that made collapse inevitable long before anyone said the word.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what's genuinely difficult to explain about the Soviet economic collapse: it didn't happen suddenly. It happened over decades, in plain sight, measured in statistics that the Soviet state generated itself.
In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, the Soviet economy was expanding at somewhere between six and eight percent annually. That's not spectacular by the standards of postwar reconstruction, but it was real, measurable growth.
The abstract numbers reflect something very concrete. The Soviet command economy couldn't feed Siberia.
While the civilian economy stagnated, military spending went in the opposite direction. The arms race with the United States consumed resources at a rate the Soviet economy simply couldn't sustain.
If Afghanistan exposed military limits, Chernobyl on the twenty-sixth of April nineteen eighty-six exposed something more fundamental. It broke the spell.
Lenin had known since the founding of the Soviet state that holding together a multi-ethnic empire required a theoretical framework. His solution was the Soviet federation: republics nominally granted sovereignty, in theory able to secede, but in practice controlled absolutely by Moscow and the party apparatus that ran through every institution in every republic.
Gorbachev's economic reform program, perestroika, began with real intent. The problem was structural rather than ideological.
The hardliners within the party and KGB watched all of this and drew a straightforward conclusion. Gorbachev had to be removed.
By December of nineteen ninety-one, the Soviet Union was a legal entity that no longer corresponded to any political reality. On the twenty-fifth of December, Gorbachev resigned.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.