The Last Years Of The Soviet Union - 1396 Words

The Last Years of the Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR was at one time one of leading world powers, only rivaled by the United States. So that begs the questions, â€Å"how could a country that was at one time so dominant fall so far?† In this essay I will examine the circumstances that led up to the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall by mainly focusing Mikhail Gorbachev’s term as leader of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and what changes he brought about through glasnost and perestroika, democratization and the national independence movements that began as a result of it, and lastly failed coup by conservative members of the USSR against Gorbachev that ultimately became the last nail in the coffin for the†¦show more content†¦His solution was to launch a new campaign promoting reconstruction, or perestroika, to mainly to decentralize the USSR’s government. However Gorbachev soon realized that he could not impleme nt his new plan without first changing the perspective of the people within the USSR itself and thus pushed forward his other campaign focusing on openness or glasnost. Gorbachev’s goal with glasnost was to gain the peoples trust. Before Gorbachev people within the Soviet Union had little to no voice when it came to decisions within their own country, usually just having to accept whatever choices that the leaders in Moscow had made. He tried to make the Soviet government appear more trustworthy than it had ever seemed before by making the government management of the country almost transparent. It was a policy of openness and discussions of political and social issues would be open for discussion. This meant that every action the government took would be public knowledge and open to debate. The results of glasnost also caused a decline in censorship, which lead new found freedom of speech, which in turn led to increased criticism of decisions that the Soviet Union had made p rior. Media outlets now were allowed to voice their own opinions and not worry about the ramifications in doing so because glasnost was slowly loosening the stranglehold that the Communist party held over the media. The media began to expose numerous social and economic problems that the