Anonymouse wrote:NinjaDude14 wrote:What year did USSR split up? and why?
To give you a short and simplistic answer, the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed is because of the nature of centrally controlled economies and States. No government bureaucrat or system can fully take into account all the information that goes into other peoples - individuals' - decision making. And if you study chaos theory, the more complex systems get, the more they veer off into disorder because they find it more difficult to adapt and deal with the various complexities that continue to arise.
This is fine, as far as it goes--but it doesn't go very far. If this were the only explanation, China would have disintegrated by now. The Russian Empire which preceded the Soviet Union was as polyglot and ethnically diverse, but survived because the autocratic regime did not attempt to control the economic activity of it's subjects beyond what was obvious to the petty officials responsible for the excise functions. Nor did that empire attempt to provide a ubiquitous level of public services commensurate with socialist ideology--education, medical care and infrastructure.
Yugoslavia can stand as an example of what killed the Soviet Union in microcosm--the Serbs and Croats represented the majority ethnic groups, and were fatally divided. Although they speak what is essentially the same language, the Serbs employ the Cyrillic alphabet and practice the Orthodox form of Christianity. The Croats employ the Roman alphabet and practice Roman Catholicism. After the death of Tito, the Serbs began to attempt their dream of the centuries, which is a "Greater Serbia" in which all of the ethnic groups of the region would be subsumed in a Serb controlled state. As the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, and the Muslim and minority Christian Bosnians of Bosnia-Herzegovina were not interested, and were willing to fight Serb tyranny, the war which broke out in 1991 was inevitable.
In the Soviet Union, the Russians took the place of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. However, in the Soviet Union, the Russians were heir to a centuries old empire which had already "united" diverse ethnic and religious groups. The collapse of the Soviet Union was more directly affected by the collapse of their eastern European hegemony than by the inefficacy of their command economy. The old economy could have creaked along as it was for quite a long time--the Soviet Union had the relationship of an old, 18th century mercantile empire toward it's eastern European hegemony, and guaranteed loans from western institutions such as the World Bank to the eastern European states. Greed being what it is, the western institutions were nothing loathe to make loans which were probably never intended to be repaid.
With the implementation of "glasnost" and "perestroika," a climate was created in which criticism of the state was at last permitted. This had its effect in eastern Europe, which had never willingly accepted Russian hegemony (in particular, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary had opposed, and at one time or another, rebelled against Soviet domination). With the advent of "glasnost" and "perestroika," what little moral authority the Russians might have commanded disintegrated. When Hungary opened its border to Austria, East Germans began to flood across, and the cracks in the Soviet edifice of hegemony widened fatally. Like ripples in a pond rebounding from the opposite shore, this disintegration spread back through the Soviet Union, as ripe for disintegration as was the Yugoslav state. Romania had its own insane dictatorship, which lead to a bloody rebellion once the heavy hand of Soviet dominance was lifted--and the Romanian state continued to victimize itself with "Stalinist" leadership. The Bulgarians had looked on Russia as their savior and bulwark since long before the Bolshevik Revolution, and were left to wander off on their own like a bewildered and bereft child as the Soviet Union collapsed.
China, however, has been ethnically unified for literally millennia. Although there are many dialects in China, sufficiently dissimilar as to make them virtually separate languages, the Mandarin language has always been a unifying factor, just as the Mandarins themselves were once a unifying factor in imperial policy and practice. Religion has never held a place sufficiently important in the Chinese Empire to provide a factor for disintegration, and the attitude of the Chinese to their neighbors, to any other nationality, for that matter, is such that for whatever happens within their own borders economically or politically, it is highly unlikely that the nation would ever disintegrate.
Of course, the Chinese have forestalled the deleterious of a command economy be allowing a rapacious and unregulated individual capitalism to arise within its borders. But economic decisions are still made at the highest levels, and economic policy is formulated and enforced from the top. If Anonymouse's thesis were correct (and i don't deny it's strong points), China might have collapsed economically before it swallowed the bitter capitalist pill--but there would have been no reason to assume that China would have fragmented, it is just not in the cards for what has been a unitary nation for more than 2000 years.
Anonymouse's thesis can explain why the Soviet Union collapses--
given the other factors, particularly the wide ethnic diversity within the Soviet Union and the latent resistance within the eastern European hegemony. It does not, however, explain why the Soviet Union would thereafter have fragmented, nor does it describes circumstances which could have, solely by their own impact, lead to the collapse of the Soviet empire.
and someone please tell me how i get an avatar..
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