3 Reasons Why Gorbachev Failed
By: Audrius Šaras
Tags: Communism, History, Democracy, Oil, Chernobyl

Saudi Arabia shocked the Soviet Union in 1985. Source: Getty Images, Russia Beyond

The most important crisis- the oil crisis of 1986

In the 1980s, the Soviet economy suffered from increasing stagnation, due to productivity growth falling below zero by the early 1980s, excess military spending, and corruption. Throughout the 1970–the 80s, the Soviet Union ranked as one of the world’s top producers of energy resources such as oil and natural gas, and exports of those commodities played a vital role in shoring up the world’s largest command economy.

“The date of the USSR’s collapse is well known. It’s not the day of the Belovezha Accords, nor the August coup [of 1991]. It was Sept. 13, 1985 when Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Oil, [Ahmed] Yamani, declared that Saudi Arabia was quitting the agreement on oil production restraint, and started to boost its share in the oil market. After this, Saudi Arabia increased oil production by 5.5 fold, and oil prices dropped by 6.1 fold” — Egor Gaidar (economist), the architect of radical economic reforms in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s

As oil prices rose in the 1980s, the USSR pumped more oil to generate more revenue in order to build more infrastructure to consume more fuel. It also wasted an enormous amount of petroleum, men, and rubles in a vain attempt to conquer Afghanistan. Additionally, the communist regime subsidized the energy needs of North Korea, eastern Europe, and Cuba. Europeans travelled to East Berlin to catch the cheapest flights to India in the 1980s all thanks to Soviet fuel subsidies.

When oil plunged from $120 a barrel in 1980 to $24 a barrel in March 1986, vital revenues had begun to deteriorate. Soviet oil production dropped nearly 50% between 1988 and 1995 from 12 million barrels to 7 million barrels. Cheap petroleum was incredibly important because it kept Eastern Europe under communist control while oil export revenue paid for essential grain imports. Without it, the Soviet economy and consequently, the entire USSR collapsed.

According to U.S. economist Doug Reynolds, as a result — the Red Empire just ran out of fuel.

The Chernobyl disaster

The famous picture of the Chernobyl disaster. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/retropod/the-day-before-the-chernobyl-disaster/

The explosion and subsequent fires created by the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactors released more than 400 times the amount of radioactive fallout as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Gorbachev, having no control over the explosion, made immature decisions that later haunted him. There were attempts to suppress information about the severity of the disaster, going as far as “to order that May Day parades and celebrations in the affected area should proceed as planned”. Despite this, the West started reporting dangerously high levels of wind-transported radioactivity, while those in the contamination zone were dealing with radiation poisoning’s physical effects.

Seeing the severity of the disaster, thousands of ordinary people and many government officials lost the last bit of trust in the Soviet system.

Decades later, Gorbachev marked the anniversary of the disaster by stating, “even more than my launch of perestroika, [Chernobyl] was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

Chernobyl was so significant because it challenged the newly started Glasnost(openness), which didn’t stand the fight as the Soviet government covered and hid the disaster from Soviet people, all of which had been done with Gorbachev’s approval. Chernobyl is the moment when Gorbachev didn’t follow his own reform.

Soviet citizens support for democratization and capitalism

The row for a Big Mac, Moscow, 1990. Source: https://sputniknews.com/photo/202002011078199527-mcdonalds-anniversary-ussr-first/

Indeed, Glasnost had ushered in a flurry of new concepts, ideas, and experiences, and Soviet citizens were eager to explore them. As Gorbachev was more lenient to the ideas that came from the Western world, some ideas and investments became real. For example, on 31 January 1990, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow. The image of the Golden Arches in Pushkin Square seemed like a triumph of Western capitalism, and customers lined up around the block for their first taste of a Big Mac. They were queued just as long for morning editions of liberal newspapers with columns containing Western philosophers’ thoughts.