explain the fall of the soviet union starting in 1985 with the rise of mihkail gorbachev?

Answer 1

most of its economy was driven by defense, with the end of the Cold War, thus many jobs lost.

Answer 2

The Soviet Union had a centralized, planned economy. It suffered from terrible inefficiencies, compounded by the fact that there were practically no incentives for anyone to put forth any more effort at their job than necessary. Workers were incredibly unmotivated. Corruption was endemic, really an entrenched, tacitly accepted institution. The two common refrains were:

1) They pretend to pay me, and I pretend to work.

2) If you're not stealing from your job, you're stealing from your family.

In the long run, every political system can only survive with a measure of public support. By the mid 1980s, the economy was detetiorating so badly that people were despondant and had no faith in the future. They no longer believed what the Communist party bosses were saying. Add to this the increase in cultural contact with the West, which produced a lot of very jealous, dissatisfied Communists. They saw how prosperous the West was, and the decades old promises that sacrificing now would mean a glorious future seemed completely hollow.

If you were a Western tourist in Eastern Europe back in the 1980s, you would be met with looks of hostile jealousy on the streets. People in Communist countries were tired and embarrassed with their standard of living.

Once Ronald Reagan entered the scene as President of the United States, the die was cast. Reagan was determined to defeat the Soviet Union by bankrupting it. He began making it prohibitively expensive for the Soviets to keep up with us militarily. He funded the Afghan rebels, which led to incredibly traumatic feelings of despair and helplessness by the citizens of the Soviet Union. Their soldiers were so desperate to leave Afghanistan, they were literally shooting each other.

The Soviets realized that to survive economically, and to keep their empire intact, they needed to open up their economy, and ease up on their stifling social policies. Hence, they employed two strategies: perestroika (which means "restructuring", referring to restructuring the Soviet economy) and glasnost. Here is Wikipedia's explanation of glasnost: "While in the West the notion of "glasnost" is associated with freedom of speech, the main goal of this policy was to make the country's management transparent and open to debate, thus circumventing the narrow circle of apparatchiks who previously exercised complete control of the economy. Through reviewing the past or current mistakes being made, it was hoped that the Soviet people would back reforms such as perestroika."

These reforms turned out to be a very dangerous path. The very changes necessary to liberalize their economy were incompatible with the rigid state-owned, centrally planned methods of production and distribution the Communists had been using.

Once there was more freedom of speech, people exercised it, and "dangerous" ideas spread. The lies necessary to keep the Communist system in place were exposed, and people wouldn't tolerate being oppressed any longer.

Once Reagan had forced the Soviet economy to the breaking point, Gorbachev realized their empire could no longer survive. As a result, the Soviet Union literally disbanded itself.