I understand that argument, but I don't fully agree with it. The expansion of military debt certainly hurt the USSR, but it wouldn't cause a collapse. If that were true, the "Bomber Gap" issue in the 1950's should have destroyed them because they could never have competed with the US's insane 24/7 nuclear bomber patrol.
The real problem is that the food situation in the USSR was becoming totally unsustainable. If Gorbechev didn't liberalize agriculture from what it was, there'd be a famine and he didn't want what happened to China. He believed that he could manage liberalization in the Soviet Union to a degree that would keep it alive. Unfortunately, he couldn't. Nationalist movements in Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, Checkslovakia, and Estonia seized the opportunity to basically publicly expose the corruption and incompetence of their local Communist parties, followed by the stupidity of the communist party generally.
After Poland's move to break-away and the revolution in Romania, the thing that fully undermined the confidence in the Soviet Union was the discovery of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Estonians. One of their nationalist leaders was in the US and discovered it's existence in a museum. They'd never actually heard that the USSR and NSDAP were allies, and were always told that the Soviet Union pushed into Estonia to save it from a Nazi invasion. He certainly never knew that this was simply common knowledge in the west, and that the entire justification of Estonia's membership in the USSR was a lie to support the Nazis.
The Estonians absolutely lost their shit. And the next Comintern, they made an issue out of it, and basically lambasted the Communist party, wanted to argue that they should leave the union, and stop using the Ruble. At that point, there was very clearly blood in the water and the Communists, really for the first time since the Nazis, started really panicking.
The USSR was never going to be defeated by economics alone, see North Korea. In fact, it's hard to argue the USSR ever recovered from WW1. But the combination of pressures from strong nationalist movements, potential famines from mismanagement, and political illegitimacy is what really did the whole project in.
I don't think you are really disagreeing with me, though yours is a more nuanced take.
With a more functional economy,.or even more financial reserves, the USSR could have bought food.
Once the citizens can noonger afford bread, revolution is as inevitable as gravity. Without money, during a famine feeding and paying the army to suppress the revolution becomes next to impossible.
North Korea is something of a special case, but mostly because they are spending all the food and money they do have on keeping the army functional. The North Korean population is unlikely to balkanize.
The revolutions of the "Arab Spring" have all been fairly directly linked to the price of food as an igniting factor, however with the USSR, there were a large number of factions that had been quietly bidong their time and waiting for the right moment to throw off the shackles.
I am sure without the economic situation of the 80s, the USSR still would have fractured, it just happened much faster thanks to deft acceleration by Ron.
I understand that argument, but I don't fully agree with it. The expansion of military debt certainly hurt the USSR, but it wouldn't cause a collapse. If that were true, the "Bomber Gap" issue in the 1950's should have destroyed them because they could never have competed with the US's insane 24/7 nuclear bomber patrol.
The real problem is that the food situation in the USSR was becoming totally unsustainable. If Gorbechev didn't liberalize agriculture from what it was, there'd be a famine and he didn't want what happened to China. He believed that he could manage liberalization in the Soviet Union to a degree that would keep it alive. Unfortunately, he couldn't. Nationalist movements in Ukraine, Poland, East Germany, Checkslovakia, and Estonia seized the opportunity to basically publicly expose the corruption and incompetence of their local Communist parties, followed by the stupidity of the communist party generally.
After Poland's move to break-away and the revolution in Romania, the thing that fully undermined the confidence in the Soviet Union was the discovery of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the Estonians. One of their nationalist leaders was in the US and discovered it's existence in a museum. They'd never actually heard that the USSR and NSDAP were allies, and were always told that the Soviet Union pushed into Estonia to save it from a Nazi invasion. He certainly never knew that this was simply common knowledge in the west, and that the entire justification of Estonia's membership in the USSR was a lie to support the Nazis.
The Estonians absolutely lost their shit. And the next Comintern, they made an issue out of it, and basically lambasted the Communist party, wanted to argue that they should leave the union, and stop using the Ruble. At that point, there was very clearly blood in the water and the Communists, really for the first time since the Nazis, started really panicking.
The USSR was never going to be defeated by economics alone, see North Korea. In fact, it's hard to argue the USSR ever recovered from WW1. But the combination of pressures from strong nationalist movements, potential famines from mismanagement, and political illegitimacy is what really did the whole project in.
I don't think you are really disagreeing with me, though yours is a more nuanced take.
With a more functional economy,.or even more financial reserves, the USSR could have bought food.
Once the citizens can noonger afford bread, revolution is as inevitable as gravity. Without money, during a famine feeding and paying the army to suppress the revolution becomes next to impossible.
North Korea is something of a special case, but mostly because they are spending all the food and money they do have on keeping the army functional. The North Korean population is unlikely to balkanize.
The revolutions of the "Arab Spring" have all been fairly directly linked to the price of food as an igniting factor, however with the USSR, there were a large number of factions that had been quietly bidong their time and waiting for the right moment to throw off the shackles.
I am sure without the economic situation of the 80s, the USSR still would have fractured, it just happened much faster thanks to deft acceleration by Ron.