The Fall of the USSR, Pt I

Stuff You Should Know

This episode of 'Stuff You Should Know' explores the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, focusing on the pivotal role

Key takeaways

• Gorbachev's reforms were intended to modernize socialism but inadvertently accelerated the collapse of the Soviet system.
• The planned economy failed due to lack of supply-demand signaling, leading to widespread shortages and inefficiency.

Main topics

• Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership
• Perestroika and Glasnost reforms

Notable quotes

"It was a top-down thing. Like, it wasn't an uprising. Although, as we'll see, like on the Eastern Bloc, there were definitely some uprisings and things that happened as a result."

Conclusion

The fall of the USSR in the early 1990s marked a historic turning point in global politics,

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:36) On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:15) Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them Speaker 1 (1:22) with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. Speaker 3 (1:28) We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (1:43) Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 2 (1:53) Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And we're just a few Cold War kids working out our ongoing fascination with the Soviet Union. Speaker 4 (2:05) That's right. This is a, uh, man, it's been a long time since we've done a two-parter. I was trying to remember the last time we did this. Probably ADHD. Yeah, maybe. I'm weirdly excited by a two-parter for some reason. Speaker 2 (2:18) Yeah, it is a little weird. Speaker 4 (2:20) It feels like less work? Even though it's not? Speaker 2 (2:24) It's fun also to tackle something and like really understand it even further, you know? Speaker 4 (2:29) No, I totally agree. Like smashing this into a single 45-minute episode would have short-shrifted it, I think. Speaker 2 (2:36) You know what we did? We scored it with a sickle and then smashed it down the middle with a hammer. Speaker 1 (2:42) Wow. Look at you. Speaker 2 (2:44) Yeah. So we are talking about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. For some reason, the CCCP in Russia, Soviet Russia. I mean, how many times are we going to do Yakov Smirnoff in this episode? Speaker 4 (3:01) I'm going to try not to do it once. Speaker 2 (3:03) Well, you do a better Yakov Smirnoff than me, so I hope you will. Although Branson, the very nicest time of year. There you go. So, yeah, and in the, I think the, basically 1990 to the very beginning of 1992. Speaker 2 (3:20) this superpower, one of two superpowers in the world, the way that the world was aligned was based on these two superpowers. One of them just fell over and was gone in the blink of an eye. Like really Speaker 4 (3:36) quickly. Speaker 2 (3:36) Yeah. I mean, like just breathtakingly fast, it went away. And not just the country, this superpower, but also the... Speaker 2 (3:48) Soviet communism itself. It was just gone, Chuck. Just gone. Speaker 4 (3:53) Gone. And the end of an ideal, the end of a Cold War, like it was, you know, I can't think of anything that was bigger since the end of World War II geopolitically. Like this had to be the biggest thing. Speaker 2 (4:08) I think absolutely for sure. The best part about it, though, at least as far as the world was concerned, it didn't take a nuclear World War III. To bring the Cold War and the bipolar, I guess, orientation of the world to an end. Speaker 4 (4:27) Yeah. And it was a top-down thing. Like, it wasn't an uprising. Although, as we'll see, like on the Eastern Bloc, there were definitely some uprisings and things that happened as a result. But the whole thing started as a top-down thing because of one guy, because of Michail Gorbachev. Is it Gorbachev? Oh, he said Gorbachev. Speaker 2 (4:46) I always heard both throughout our youth. Speaker 4 (4:49) All right, great. So I'll just say both. I'm just going to call him Gorby. Yeah, that's right. It was because of a series of decisions that he made to... Speaker 4 (5:01) to not fully westernize the Soviet Union, but to loosen the reins some, to get a little capitalism in there, to get a little more transparency, relax the reins on the, you know, the hard fist of the Soviet regime, to kind of just have a newer sort of softer Soviet Union moving forward. And boy, he, I don't know if he didn't fully think it through or if it was just, the domino effect was so fast, I'm sure he was probably like, wow, like, I didn't think this was going to happen. Speaker 2 (5:36) Yeah. He's just standing there, like, looking guilty while the whole room is just falling down around him because he touched something he wasn't supposed to, kind of. Speaker 4 (5:45) Yeah, for sure. But it all sort of started with these two major reforms that he set out to establish, which was, in Russian, it would be perestroika. and Glasnod. But to us, that would be restructuring and transparency. And I guess we should talk about the restructuring first. Speaker 2 (6:06) Yeah, perestroika. One more thing I do want to say about Gorby, though, before we move on, is I didn't see anything anywhere that suggested that this was secretly purposeful. I think you're absolutely right. I think he was completely taken off guard by the consequences of these pretty legitimate and... good ideas at the time because Gorbachev inherited a USSR that was in deep stagnation by the mid-1980s, right? Yeah. It was a planned economy, and it had been moving along in that direction for decades. But by this time, by the 80s, it was just, it was not in good shape. And so, like you said, to kind of like jumpstart... the socialist economy, not replace it, but jumpstart it, he was willing to implement some Western-style free market ideas. Speaker 4 (7:00) Yeah. I mean, he was a very progressive guy for Soviet Russia. Mm Speaker 2 (7:05) -hmm. Speaker 4 (7:05) You know? So it was the late 80s where he launched this, like we mentioned the first thing, the restructuring or the perestroika. And that was to sort of, that was sort of the economical, political side of things to kind of loosen the grips a little bit. Because he was like the reality of what our ideals are and what's really going on. Like there's a big gap there. So he thought maybe if we have this program of like political renewal and maybe some ethics and morals being introduced like systematically, then maybe we can improve what's going on here. And that was what perestroika was supposed to be about. Speaker 2 (7:46) Yeah, and Glastonbury, both of them together. So that planned economy, Chuck, here's what Gorby inherited. So you have the ruble, which was the official currency of the USSR. It was not accepted or recognized outside of the USSR or outside of the Eastern Bloc, I should say, outside the Iron Curtain. Speaker 4 (8:03) Yeah, big problem. Speaker 2 (8:04) It is a big problem. Number two, the Soviet government was responsible for deciding how much of what any given thing was made in any given year. Right. It wasn't based on supply and demand. It was based on a planned economy. They also set prices for those things. So if you put all those things together, the Soviet economy had no way of signaling who needed what, where, when. And so there were shortages everywhere. There was lots of waste. And there were very few businesses. All the businesses in this planned economy were owned by the state. There were very few of those businesses that didn't need to also be propped up artificially because they were just losing money left and right. Speaker 4 (8:52) Yeah. So, I mean, like you said, what he inherited was in bad shape already. One of the reasons, and, you know, I remember this is something we heard a lot, like growing up as Gen Xers, was that the Soviets are trying to keep pace in the Cold War and the space race. and everything else. And they can't keep up that spending like we could there in the West. And that was true. All that government spending put a real dent in their financial outlook. The war and invasion of Afghanistan over a 10-year period from 79 to 89 was very costly. Speaker 2 (9:27) And Speaker 4 (9:27) then Chernobyl. I mean, we'll talk a little bit about just the cost of like the... Speaker 4 (9:35) I guess, ethical cost of the cover up and what that did to dent their image, like within, you know, Russia and the Soviet Union. But it literally cost a lot of money, like at least $18 billion, like $1986 to to clean it up, to contain it. And that was on top of everything else, like the straw that broke the camel's back. Speaker 2 (9:55) Yeah, that was a big deal for them, for sure. Did you ever see that Chernobyl miniseries with Jared? I can't remember his last name. Jared Harris. Yeah, one of the finest actors of all time, I think. Speaker 4 (10:07) Yeah, you bet your butt I did. It was outstanding. Speaker 2 (10:11) Outstanding. I wish all miniseries were that good. Speaker 4 (10:14) Yeah, it was one of the best ones I'd seen. Speaker 2 (10:16) Yeah, agreed. So again, Perestroika is Gorby coming along and being like, okay, we're in big trouble. We need some money fast and we need to just make some adjustments. So some of those adjustments were basically, this was huge. Like these were... incredibly radical with the backdrop of the Soviet economy, right? One was allowing companies from outside the USSR to start up businesses in the USSR, and they would be joint ventures co-owned by the company and by the Soviet Union, right? So now all of a sudden you have new expertise, new ideas, new innovation, new high-quality products coming in, and a bunch of money. outside investment coming into the USSR. That's a pretty good idea, right? Speaker 4 (11:05) Yeah, that was a good idea. As part of that, he said, maybe we should also get the locals involved. So hand over some of the ownerships of some of these state-run enterprises that we've had, which is basically all business, Speaker 1 (11:18) from Speaker 4 (11:19) the government only owned by the government to a locally elected workers' collective or a series of them. And so that meant that you could have private business in the Soviet Union for the first time. And then the other one was, you know, you mentioned that they had, like, quotas for companies. They didn't look at market corrections, like supply and demand, to indicate how they should run stuff. They said, all right, maybe we should allow businesses to, like, you know, instead of having shortfalls of stuff that we really need, maybe they should fulfill beyond the quotas for a change. You know, you got to make the amount set by the quota. But beyond that, you could continue making that stuff if there is demand for it. Speaker 2 (11:59) For sure. OK, so these are very radical ideas, but. Had he just gone with perestroika, my money is on perestroika alone would not have torn down the USSR. I think it was a combination, and probably more than anything, it was really glasnost that did it. The problems with perestroika were immediately apparent. There were, by investing more power into the... the republics that all made up the Soviet Union. Speaker 1 (12:35) Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:36) They started to withhold tax payments that were supposed to go to the central government, right? They were kind