Aight so first of all, the Soviet Union was formally structured as a voluntary union of independent nations that were bound together by the Union treaty, under the leadership of a single political party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Remember this for later.

Secondly, World War Two decimated the Soviet population and the ranks of the Communist party. This left the USSR with a labor shortage that it did not quickly recover from, as well as a Communist party full of cadres who may not have been the most qualified people.

This leads us to Nikita Khrushchev, who did several things that hurt the USSR both in his immediate tenure and in the long term. First, he gave his “secret speech,” in which he denounced Stalin, blaming him solely for the excesses of the great fear, the purges in the party, and the injustices that had occurred in that time. He also denounced Stalin for encouraging a so-called “cult of personality,” which led to a campaign of De-Stalinization, in which Stalin’s statues were torn down nationwide, Stalingrad was renamed, and Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s tomb, etc. The consequences were severe: the international prestige of the Soviet Union and communism were seriously damaged, with mass resignations from communist parties all over the world. The secret speech and De-Stalinization led to a blow in the self-confidence of the CPSU that it never recovered from.

Khrushchev then attempted to compete with the west in the realm of consumer goods, wanting to prove the superiority of socialism by using the Soviet planning apparatus to supercharge the mass-production of these goods. The trouble is that, at least as far as we know, state planning without a market distribution system is ineffective at creating the kind of consumer economy that western, capitalist countries enjoy (if such an economy is even desirable for a socialist society in the first place.) Under Stalin, most consumer goods had been manufactured by Artels (co-operative businesses) that had flexibility from state planning and relative independence. Khrushchev nationalized these cooperatives, which vastly increased the amount of inputs and outputs that state planners needed to keep track of, over-complicating the economic plans, eliminating flexible small and medium sized businesses and leaving only giant corporations, creating toxic incentives and various absurdities in the Soviet economy. As an example, in the 1980s, under Perestroika, a delegation from the optics industry in the west was invited to tour a Soviet optics factory. They were impressed by the level of optics technology that was being produced, which was comparable to anything in the west, but the factory manager complained that his ability to produce optics equipment was hampered by the factory needing to divert its resources to fulfill quotas for bicycles. Over time, this policy also led to an informal economy of unregulated market activity, as various enterprises and connected people used semi-legal or illegal ways to acquire and trade scarce consumer goods.

This all led to a liberal “Khrushchevite” tendency or faction to grow within the party and within the intellectual quarters of Soviet society- a tendency that measured Soviet success by comparing it to the west in every way. While Leonid Brezhnev was more successful successful in managing the economy, he failed to correct the fundamental distortions in the economy created by Khrushchev, or the faction in the party he created. Mikhail Gorbachev came from this tendency.

I’m tired and don’t want to write much anymore, so someone else pick up from here or I’ll come back to it later, but I’ll make a long story short: Gorbachev fucked everything up. He made all these problems worse by trying to fix them, surrendered unilaterally to the west in terms of the cold war, empowered a group of national leaders that were incentivized to demand more and more local powers to their countries, until those leaders broke the whole thing up.