What ended the Soviet Union?

>>2143293
>Ronald Reagan
Nailed it.

>>2143293

the jews

>t: /pol/

The failure of their system to keep pace with the western world.

Hence why they were a menace in the 50s and a joke by the 80s.

Ronald "Praise Jesus" Reagan

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The economic and political system is a complete fucking mess. No money to be invested when prices are already set, property can't be owned, people forced to work all day and be taxed more than 2/3 of there check. Stalins labror discipline policy, anyone who idles for 20 minutes will either face a find, prison, or execution. As a result, 250,000 people were killed, +1million placed in prison, and countless starvation. The soviet technology was behind(before much space race, German scientist that they took after WW2)they had primitve agriculture. Their system had a short economic monster growth (1945-1972) but after it stop. Complete fucking collapse. Funny thing, at the height of Soviet Union it was 1/8th of the USA. I know this word will trigger some but we call this extractive institution.

>>2143293
Military competition with America

>>2143434
So Ronald Reagan

>>2143293
Glasnost and Perestroïka. The second the USSR gave Capitalism an inch, they took a mile.

The many many years of the CIA trying to sabotage the economy and the 70 years of propaganda all in the name of investors. then told the people it was for humanitarian purposes

It could have continued indefinitely if the leaders had decided to use their military power to enforce it. Apparently Gorbachev visited Canada and saw an average residential neighborhood with two cars outside most houses and realised capitalism raised living standards higher for the average worker than the soviet union could even dream of.

>>2143515
a fords success at engineering the modern car culture is not an indicator of "raised living standards" the car culture actually lowers living standards as it results in:

traffic
2 hour commutes
smog/pollution
ailing health, obesity
less socialization and interaction
financial burden on keeping up with inflated oil/insurance prices

infact, high quality of life depends on independence from the car

thats why people are abandoning the ford lifestyle of the suburbs to the cities offering the best public transport and pedestrian-friendly widewalks

if anything, the soviets had a higher QOL compared to your isolated, socially impaired westerner under fordian domination

>>2144936
>the soviets had a higher QOL compared to your isolated, socially impaired westerner under fordian domination
I agree with your argument that cars don't improve quality of life as much as people think but I doubt quality of life was actually higher in the USSR than in the USA. It probably wasn't capitalism which caused this disparity as when capitalism was introduced to the former USSR it was a catastrophe and only those countries which received massive stimulus from the EU/NATO/USA/IMF/WorldBank (with deals that wouldn't strip their resources and kill their economy) were better off after the collapse.

The USSR was always fucked. The USA was able to convince most of the world to fund their high tech economy and weapons development with trade deals that were largely one sided in the favor of the USA. All this was done to defeat communism, don't mind the fact that a group of aristocrats were becoming incredibly wealthy in this system and undermining democratic principles which the USA and many other countries were founded on.

>>2143293
I think its economics was too rigid.
Communism and planned economics, MAYBE, were important to raise the country after WW2, but after that it became an anchor tied to the walker's leg.
High oil prices were used to keep the economics alive 20 years longer than it could be without it.

>>2146355
Except the USA has been a centrally planned economy since FDR. The difference is that in the USA it is financial managers who run the economy and not politicians.

>>2143293
>Harry Potter and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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>>2143293
The USSR collapsed partly because Russia literally ran out of money to pay for food imports and Gorbachev had to beg the West for aid to keep the entire population from starving. The Soviet external debt situation had by 1989 reached completely untenable levels.

lolcommunism.

>>2146153
>It probably wasn't capitalism which caused this disparity as when capitalism was introduced to the former USSR it was a catastrophe and only those countries which received massive stimulus from the EU/NATO/USA/IMF/WorldBank (with deals that wouldn't strip their resources and kill their economy) were better off after the collapse.

This is complete bullshit btw. Poland for example currently has higher GDP per capita than Russia despite having 1/3 of Russia's GDP per capita in 1989. And before you start getting whining about outside aid, know that the numbers on Poland are public knowledge.

Aid to Poland totaled $40 billion during the 90s. Half of that was in debt write-offs reducing Poland's foreign debt from 90% of GDP to around 60%, and half of it was IMF subsidized loans with conditions Russia got as well. Once Poland joined the EU the EU gave it large amounts of aid, but by then the Polish economy have already surged past 1990 levels. Today annual EU aid to Poland is about 25 billion euros per year, or about 6% of Polish GDP. By contrast oil and gas was 16% or Russia's GDP prior to the recent plunge. Poland doesn't have the shitload of oil reserves that Russia does, so this more than makes up for the already small difference.

And Poland got more aid than most other Eastern Bloc countries, which have also all surpassed both their pre-capitalism selves and Russia. Czechoslovakia for example.

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Corruption of the regional elites and weakness of the center.