Conclusion

The Soviet Union’s strengths generated its weaknesses. Its tightly centralized struc­ture enabled it to prioritize resources in the early stages of economic development and in the war against Germany.

Yet those achievements all had downsides. The Soviet Union’s centralized economy proved too inflexible to provide for a diversified consumer market or in the end for the needs of its own armed forces in competition with the United States. The equally centralized political system frustrated the national liberation proclaimed in its ethnic policies, and spawned resentment and rebellion in its outer empire. Its ideological message was contradicted by the way in which it was delivered; and in any case, it implied its own shadow message, of equality, abun­dance, and freedom, which it could not fulfill. Its own highly educated elites took up that shadow message, which ultimately “infected” the party hierarchy too.

None of these contradictions would probably have proved fatal, had not the ide­alism and even messianism characteristic of early Communists been renewed in the person of Gorbachev. Initially his opponents lacked an institutional base from which to combat him—until the largest republic, the RSFSR, provided one on which both his liberal and his conservative opponents could take their stand. Thereby le­gitimacy became fatally split, and the Soviet Union was finally doomed.

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