What destroyed the Soviet Union?

The Soviet Union, the bastion of Marxist Leninist thinking, fell on the 26th of December 1991.

Fukuyama wrote a book calling the period that follows this the "End of History.""

In many ways, they were right. It signalled the end of an era for the world and political thinking, but the consequences we are only now just beginning to feel in the West.

References

Primary

Broadcast. Vremya . Moscow, USSR: Central Television of the USSR, April 28, 1986.

derzhavnyy himn Ukrayiny, Pro. "About the national anthem of Ukraine." Zakon Ukrayiny vid 602-IV (2003): 602-15.Fourth

Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, Georges Peronansky, and Tatjana Varsavsky. "Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs." (1995).

Keller, Bill. “Gorbachev Listens to the People and Gets an Earful.” The New York Times. September 13, 1988.

Yeltsin, Boris. "Speech to the Russian Parliament, August 21, 1991." In Russia at the Barricades, Routledge, 2015.

Secondary 

Bittner, Stephen V. “The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat.” Cornell University Press, 2008.

Brown, Archie. "The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU." In Authority, power and policy in the USSR. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1980.

Dawisha, Karen. “The Kremlin and the Prague spring. Vol. 4”. Univ of California Press, 1984.

Hughes, Gerain Hosking, Geoffrey A. The awakening of the Soviet Union. Harvard University Press, 

1991.t. "The Soviet Afghan War, 1978–1989: An Overview." Defence Studies 8, no. 3 (2008): 326-350.

Kamrany, Nake M., and David T. Killian. "Effects of Afghanistan War on Soviet Society and Policy." International Journal of Social Economics 19, no. 7/8/9 (1992): 129-151.

Lewin, Moshe. "Russian peasants and soviet power-a study of collectivization." Russian peasants and soviet power-a study of collectivization. (1968).

Malko, Mikhail V. "The chernobyl reactor: design features and reasons for accident." Recent research activities about the Chernobyl NPP accident in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia (2002): 11.

Marples, David R., and David R. Marples. "The Effects of The Chernobyl Disaster." Ukraine under Perestroika: Ecology, Economics and the Workers’ Revolt (1991): 17-48.

Mastny, Vojtech, and Malcolm Byrne, eds. “A cardboard castle? an inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991.” Central European University Press, 2005.

McKenzie, Brent. "Twenty years on–retailer advertising during and since the fall of the Soviet Union: Tallinna Kaubamaja,“Estonia’s Department Store”." In Handbook of research on international advertising, pp. 179-197. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012.

Moberg, Leif. "The Chernobyl fallout in Sweden." (1991).

Plokhy, Serhii. “Chernobyl: History of a tragedy.” Penguin UK, 2018.

Plokhy, Serhii. “The last empire: the final days of the Soviet Union.” Hachette UK, 2015.

Schmid, Sonja D. Producing power: The pre-Chernobyl history of the Soviet nuclear industry. MIT Press, 2015.

Shevtsova, Lilia. "The August coup and the Soviet collapse." Survival 34, no. 1 (1992): 

Smith, David James. “The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Vol. 11”. Psychology Press, 2002.

Tompson, William J. “The Soviet Union under Brezhnev”. Routledge, 2014. 

Wells, Ludmilla Gricenko. "Western concepts, Russian perspectives: Meanings of advertising in the former Soviet Union." Journal of Advertising 23, no. 1 (1994): 

Yurievna, GLINSKAYA Irina. "The Role of the Symbol in the Process of Formation of the Image of the State." ISSN 2078-9025 № 3 (32) сентябрь 2016 Серия «РеГионалиСтика и этноПолитика» 3 (2016): 42.и этноПолитика» 3 (2016): 42.

[Tunda]

You got it all wrong man, the Soviet Union fell because they lost that one hockey game and Rocky beat Drago.

[typo_]

The massive fuckup that USSR has done to Chernobyl has forever tainted the public's perception on nuclear power, setting us back massively

[blueteamepsilon]

This video helps explain to me why tankies think the SU wouldn't have fallen if they were allowed to kill anyone who disagreed with them.

[eppcialism]

You merely came across the chicken ad.
I was born in Estonia AFTER the USSR fell and still I was forced to see it.

It's basically still a meme.

[ironwolf]

If you think about it, it makes sense Kruzchev hated Stalin. He saw him at his worst, and given the fact this is Stalin, that's saying something

[nrrork]

I don't think Gorbechev gets enough credit for softening the landing.

The inevitable collapse of the USSR could have gone _a lot_ worse, but instead it ended relatively peacefully.

The whole region could've gone the way of the Balkans with decades of civil wars and new countries constantly emerging and splitting up, etc.

The region has heated up again the last couple years, and I'm not saying everything in Eastern Europe was great after 89 or 91, but it went about as smoothly as it was ever gonna.

[BgLupu]

Who would have ever thought that a 40 year military occupation of Eastern Europe would eventually backfire?

[TheCowgirlBookworm]

I love the ending sentiment of “it got so heavy it fell in on itself” because I swear that describes every change in Russian government

[francise]

Every time i watch videos about why an authoritarian regimes collapsed i'm reminder of an old phase. "You can do many things with a bayonet. But ypu cannot sit on it".

The meaning, you can maintain power by using violence. But if you do that then you can never relent and stay in power

[tranquility]

I used to work with a Polish colleague who grew up in the Soviet Union, she was born in the 70s so grew up in its final years. I’m really interested in Soviet and Cold War history so would ask her loads of questions about it - I used to get her to tell me about the Young Pioneers and what life was like. She had some really interesting stories, her main memories were from the 80s she said everyone knew it was sh*t and nobody particularly believed in the ‘system’ but just went along with it as what else could you do? She used to go to summer camps with her Pioneer group and said nobody there not the leaders or the kids gave a crap about communism, there were one or two ‘believers’ but other than that she just remembers being outside and having fun like most kids do. They completely knew about the West, listened to radio saw films etc from the west they would joke about how nothing worked yet they pretended it did - she said they just hoped things might change but never expected they would until they did.

[jrwelectricboogaloo]

Blaming the last premiere of the end of the Soviet Union is like blaming a demolition team for blowing up a condemned skyscraper that was doomed fall and the only thing he ended up doing is directing it in a path that I think did the least damage and suffering

[Ralphieboy]

Gorbachev visited the West in the 80's and saw that there were PCs almost everywhere, in nearly every business. He realized at that point that they needed that technology to be competitive, but that as a result, the government would no longer be able to keep a lid on the spread of information.

[nattygsbord]

Yeltsin was entertaining. He took his plane to Ireland for a state visit, but became so drunk along the flight that he could not show himself in public so the military band and the people outside his plane had to wait for hours without him showing up, and he never set his foot on ireland but just took his plane to fly home again LOL

[Alf]

Brezhnev is the single most responsible person for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[schiefer]

It‘s strange to think this isn’t common knowledge; not too long ago, I got my Abitur with history as one of my primary classes, and in said class an important final piece was the collapse of the USSR, right down to multiple pages on how each republic went about getting independence, and the causes and pressure described in this video. External pressure didn’t kill the USSR, it’s what kept it alive for so long.

[darrellsmith]

Imagine falling asleep in 1982, waking up a decade later and asking "What's up with the Soviet Union?"

[BigRedDragonFan]

I think there’s a huge part that’s overlooked the reliance of the Soviet union on oil. There was a huge correlation between the power of SU and the price of Russia’s oil grade.

[internetzenmaster]

"Alcoholism was basically... Tuesday" Wait, I thought this was about the Soviet Union, not Finland!

[mikedrop]

Keep on cataloging them Russian L's. It never gets old.

[Bumkuchen]

Good freaking lord, that Minced Chicken Meat "commercial" is close to some kind of cosmic horror shit that comes up as vivid hallucinations when one overdoses on prescription drugs and alcohol...