Why and how did it fall /his/? I know very little about how

>>3293866
>>3293866

It was specifically due to the fall in gas prices around that time. The USSR economy was very dependent on exporting petroleum. However, the fact that Gorbachev wasn't willing to employ authoritarian methods to keep the USSR together is what really allowed it to come up. Another leader, say Stalin, would have just clamped down and held the country together by sheer force of......force. But Gorbachev simply wasn't willing to do that.

My father's (born 1972) personal theory:
Deep disillusionment that started breaking out of the lower- and middle-rungs of society and begun seeping into even the most ideologically-driven organizations, right up to the very top. Once attempts were made to reform and slightly liberalize the system, an unpredicted and unstoppable chain-reaction started.
He specifically referred to the way the moment one of the top-guys made a play at grabbing an industry for himself, all the other top-guys rushed to do the same out of the fear of being left out. Nobody tried defending the old system.

My grandfather's (born ~1940) personal theory:
It was all that scumbag Gorbachov's fault. He engineered the Reconstruction to take everything for himself and his buddies. The Soviet Union could have been doing fine if it weren't for all the money, food and goods being sent to 3rd world countries as humanitarian aid.

>>3293866
It was almost incomprehensibly rotten and inefficient at its core. At some point there were sufficient numbers of people thinking enough of this, we can do better. And a chain of events culminating in the totally incompetent putsch of 1991 brought it down.

>>3293886
Basically this. You have to keep in mind that by 1989 the only alternative to the eventual dissolution was Balkan-style civil wars in a country full of nukes, so we all have to be thankful he wasn't Stalin.

A few things:

>Gorbachev's reforms tried to introduce capitalism without the basis of capitalism, causing the economy to implode
>glasnost caused a huge upsurge in nationalism, by 1990, no one really cared about the Soviet Union as a single entity, and people became even more convinced when the Soviet military didn't intervene when the Georgian SSR waged war on the Autonomous SSR's within its borders
>August Coup gave the nationalist sentiment the edge throughout the Union, whereas before most people wanted the USSR to continue as an EU-like entity

The crisis itself wasn't that bad, kind of similar to the 2008-9 financial crisis, what caused the Soviet Union to collapse is that the people lost confidence in their government's ability to handle the crisis.

Afghanistan had a lot to do with it, it really was the SU's Vietnam in awakening a generation of activists who would be headaches long after the withdrawal

>>3294177
>The crisis itself wasn't that bad
>kind of similar to the 2008-9 financial crisis

pick one and only one

>>3294187
I'm saying that the crisis itself wouldn't have destroyed the USSR, but people lost faith that the government would actually do anything about said crisis. Could you imagine if a state in the US just raised a militia and started burning the homes of ethnic communities, and the federal government did nothing? That's what happened in 1990-1.

>>3294192

I was specifically referring to your reference to the recession, I should have made that clearer.

>>3293866
The USSR had been collapsing since 1924. The cold war was simply an autistic spergout

File: 1319868873_pic024.jpg (33KB, 550x371px) Image search: [Google]

33KB, 550x371px

>>3294177
> The crisis itself wasn't that bad, kind of similar to the 2008-9 financial crisis
It was much worse than 2008-2009, mostly because the USSR relied heavily on imports for its food supply, and the only way to get some international currency to buy food was to sell oil and gold. Oil had been dirt cheap since the early 80s and by 1990 they ran out of gold to sell, meaning famine was a real possibility for some time. Fixed priced on food complicated the situation, even more, producing chronical shortages, some products like butter and sugar being virtually inaccessible for the general population.

>>3294209
Ah, well, in that case, up until 1989, the economy was still growing, just very slowly, in 1990, things started going downhill, but in 1991, the bottom fell out of the economy, and the GDP went into free-fall as millions of people lost their jobs when their workplaces became private entities, and lost their housing when apartments started charging rent.

>>3294241
> lost their housing when apartments started charging rent.
Never happened.