Did Гласность and Перестройка kill the USSR?

[Dortmundia]

Yes, glasnost and perestroika killed the Soviet Union. There is no doubt the USSR was in crisis but there was other solutions to her problem. The stagnation was caused due to its isolation from technological trends and the informatic revolution that was going on in the world. The best thing Gorbachev had to do was ending the Cold War (also less spending on millitary) and open trade to the world. If Gorbachev had done this the USSR today would resemble to modern day China.

[Rock Lobsters]

No it was Reagan, and nothing but him.

He flexed his trickle-down and Eastern Europe exploded from the illogic.

Trickle-down is a fitting name, since the US's piss "Trickled-down" on the Communist bloc. *wink wink, nudge nudge*

[Empire of Narnia]

It kinda did, but I think Khrushchev struck the first lethal blow. It was his reforms that paved the way for somebody like Gorbachev to come in and mess things up. Even if Russia's economy never recovered it could have still survived like North Korea if it stayed on the path of Stalin.

[Risottia]

Did they?

What say you NSG?

No they didn't. Conservatives and mafia tools such as Elcin did.

[The Huskar Social Union]

The USSR was already on the road to collapse, it could not sustain itself economically and had stagnated severely, those two policies merely hastened it fall by not working as intended.

[Kilobugya]

They were an attempt to save USSR but they came too late, and were partially misguided (they were right to allow more civil and political freedom, and to make the whole state apparatus more transparent, but they were wrong to introduce market reforms in the economy).

There is no single thing that killed the USSR, but I would identify three factors :

1. The fact that USSR was forced to fight a battle against USA which was more powerful historically (USA was much more developed in 1917 than Russia), didn't have to fight any war on its land for all the 20st century (unlike USSR who had WW1, Civil War and WW2 to fight), and had a much bigger share of the world as allies/puppets. They did manage to compete for a long time against a much stronger enemy, and even managed to beat USA in most steps of the space race, but that was at a very heavy cost on their own economy, much bigger than the cost for the USA (due to USA being powerful).

2. The misguided decision of Brezhnev to introduce some market reforms instead of pursuing cybernetic planning, and more generally, Brezhnev lack of understanding of the critical role computers would play in the late 20st century. USSR had, in the 50s and early 60s, an alive computer science field, but instead of investing massively into this field, Brezhnev disengaged from it. That was a terrible mistake.

3. The level of political repression, which was way too high to be sustainable on the long term (and inherently wrong too, but that's not the topic of this thread).

USSR could have survived by going to cybernetic planning, disengaging partially from the cold war, and granting a higher level individual/political freedoms shortly after the end of WW2. It failed to do that, and when Gorbachev arrived, it was too late. Maybe USSR could still have been saved, but it would have been very hard.

[Hyfling]

I think they backfired and hastened it's fall.

There were probably some ways out in which Russia could have maintained some of it's territory (ya' know, Central Asia, Caucasus, East Europe) should it have acted much earlier, though. Transitioning into a united capitalist(ish) republic by the 2000s.

[Shofercia]

Nope. I think that free speech should be gradually introduced, not zerg-rushed unto an unsuspecting public during major economic reforms. There's a lot of free speech on RuNet, but that's been in the works for over a decade. I'm not against the concept of Glasnost; I'm against the zerg-rush implementation of Glasnost during Perestroika.

Define: "zerg-rushed" and "gradually introduced", in context.

Zerg-rushed - what happened.
Gradually introduced - slowly introduced in bits an pieces over the time span of a decade.

And thing is, the latter is a lot more effective. The best example that I could think of, in the case of the latter, is RuNet. It's the freest society in Russia today. As for the results of zerg-rush, we both know how well that one went.