This video is a summary of the facts that lead to the collapse of the soviet union in 1991. I explain the economic stagnation, glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev's goals, the declarations of independence in the baltics along with all relevant facts.



Credit to Adoray for adding the spanish subtitles!


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E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com
The song in the outro was produced by 08 (who gave me no way to credit them), you can listen to the whole remix on my second channel: [ Ссылка ]

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:09 1 - The Path to collapse
4:45 2 - Perestroika
12:27 3 - Glasnost
20:47 4 - The declarations of independence
27:09 5 - The Red army coup
31:23 6 - Was the collapse the fault of socialism?
37:02 7 - Myths
42:51 8 - Conclusion/Outro

Sources:
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Transcript:
Hello everybody, as you know the Soviet Union was the most prominent attempt at socialism in…. well ever, only rivaled by china. And I am sure you are aware that 30 years ago it stopped existing. And the anti-communists and anti-socialists use this as proof that socialism can never work. But as I am sure you are aware the collapse of the USSR was a lot more complicated than “socialism bad therefore USSR gone” even if there are many people who genuinely seem to believe that explanation.
In this video I will go over how and why the USSR collapsed, for this I will talk about the way the USSR worked a bunch, so I recommend watching my last video before this one. I am sure you would be able to follow this video even if you have not watched the last one, but things will be clearer if you watched it. Also, I will get more views which I desperately need because my upload schedule does not exist anymore because I am severely mentally ill and barely able to do any work. Let’s get started with: Part one, The path to the collapse.
Depending on who you ask the collapse of the USSR is the fault of many things and people. Some say that general secretary Brezhnev was to blame for the eventual collapse. The story goes that under Brezhnev the party became corrupt and that the economy started stagnating. I am not sure how this is such a common view considering the USSR survived another 25 years, or one third of it’s history after Brezhnev became general secretary. Though I won’t deny that his time as general secretary was very influential.
For the sake of being 100% through I would have to explain the soviet history from 1917 onward if I really wanted to catch everything but that video would be very long and very boring so I decided to start in 1985. That’s the year general secretary Chernenko died and was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev.
At this time the Soviet Union wasn’t doing that great. Especially economically speaking. Between 1980 and 1985 the soviet GDP didn’t grow. Which apparently is a problem because … Wikipedia said so and everything must grow forever, at least if you are using a capitalist framework.
The reasons for this economic stagnation are complex, in part it was the growth of the computer age which meant that the soviet state had to invest huge amounts of money into the digitization of many of it’s state run enterprises if it didn’t want to fall behind the capitalist states. And the soviet economy had difficulty producing microprocessors. The soviet economy was more oriented towards industrial machinery rather than precision computer parts.

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