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Why Did The Soviet Union Fall Essay

785 Words4 Pages

In 1991 one of the greatest nations which at its peak ruled over 15 Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union, fell and radically changed the world's economic and political environment. The question I’m going to be answering is; why did the Soviet Union fall?

Background
The Soviet Union’s first few years of rule were remembered for a huge outburst of social and cultural change.
The Bolsheviks which was a political party soon to be called “the Communist party” led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had maintained control of the country’s economy during the civil war (November 1917 – October 1922). At the end of the war Lenin decided that if they returned to a market economy it would help the country recover from the three years of destruction that the war had brought.
Lenin’s “New Economic Policy”, or NEP, helped the Soviet Union to have some time to live in prosperity and it allowed the government to strengthen its political position and also time to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.
This was also the time for Russian art to develop and new styles were created such as Constructivism, …show more content…

They had lost over 20 million lives and people were devastated, the USSR was now sharing being one of the two most powerful countries in the world with the USA. Things became tense between the USSR and their previous allies and what followed was The Cold War which was more espionage and propaganda than bullets and destruction. The USSR still suffered from agricultural failures which resulted in people struggling to feed their families and production was still focused on everything else but consumer goods. Political freedom was restricted even further and they were not handling the economy the way it should have been handled. The poor handling of their economy in one of the reasons that the USSR fell according to a lot of historians and

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