trally controlled economy. Its diminished international power was complicated by chaos and instability in many of its bordering regions. Many successor states, such as Moldova, the Trans-Caucasian and Central Asian states were riven with internal dissension and, in some cases, wars. The major states closest to Russia in the West, Belarus and Ukraine struggled to maintain political unity and to arrest economic decline.
Reasons for the Decline of Soviet Communist Rule
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev as one of his last acts after communism had been irretrievably discredited by the failure of the attempted coup of August 1991 by Soviet hardliners, ordered the hammer and sickle to be lowered from the Kremlin ending 74 years of Soviet rule. The failed coup had propelled pro-democracy and anti-communist Russian leadership headed by Boris Yeltsin to the fore and forced Gorbachev from power. The immediate event which caused the existence of the USSR, which had been founded in 1922, to end were the declarations of independence from Moscow by all 14 of the constituent republics and the refusal of most of them to enter negotiations for a new All-Union Treaty.
A fundamental but by no means only failure of Soviet communism was its inability to achieve reasonable levels of economic performance. By the 1860s, Russia fell behind other industrializing nations. Despite enormous political difficulties, Russia did achieve rapid rates of uneven economic growth in the 25 years before World War I, but due to the effects of the war, revolution and Civil War, the Russian economy did not again achieve positive growth rates until the 1930s, except for a brief period under Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy in the mid-1920s. At enormous human costs, including mass murders which Brzezinski (1989) estimates were in the range of 20 to 40 million people, Josef Stalin succeeded then in industrializing and urbanizing large parts of the Soviet Union thro...