The Collapse Of Communism

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The Collapse of Communism and The End of Cold War


I’ll be discussing the issue of collapse of communism along the end of cold war with the view of economic factor. Nevertheless, the detected ideology of communism is explained as the main factor that led the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union to the collapse.
Russian Historian, Vladimir Batyuk, describes how the Gorbachev reforms, and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, changed Moscow's view of the world. The Communist ideology, as publicly expressed by Soviet leaders, no longer used terms like 'class struggle" by the 1970s. Mikhail Gorbachev's openness to the West, and his internal reforms - perestroika - led to the collapse of the Cold War.
Ideologically the Cold War began as early as 1917. After 1945, with the Soviet Union ascending to the status of superpower, the Cold War was transferred also to the sphere of geopolitics. At the end of the 1980s, however, it became obvious that the Communist experiment had failed miserably. The Soviet way of life, characterized by such ugly features as economic hardships, technological standstill and moral degradation, lost its appeal even for the Soviet people themselves. In the 1920s and 1930s, the West had been scared by Soviet Communist propaganda. In the 1980s, on the other hand, the Soviet authorities had to jam Western broadcasts in order to maintain control over its population. The Communist ideology, which had stimulated the Cold War on the Soviet side, deteriorated gradually. By the 1940s the slogan of `World Proletarian Revolution' had already disappeared from Soviet propaganda. After 1970, the Soviet leaders preferred not to mention such words as `Communism' or `cl!
ass struggle'. And Mikhail Gorbachev, who proclaimed the primacy of `values common to all mankind' over the `class struggle', was merely following in the footsteps of his predecessors, who had gradually rid themselves of the revolutionary features of C...