What caused the Fall of the USSR?
HOW DID SCHUMAN PREDICT THE FALL IN 1959? Do the rules apply to the EU?
In 1959 Schuman predicted that the USSR would collapse before end of 1999. On what basis? What about today’s EU?
WHAT in the 1950s led Schuman to conclude that the USSR would definitely fail before the end of 1999? Stalin had just left the scene and Khrushchev was in power. Eisenhower was then US president. Schuman’s prediction was therefore made two years before Kennedy became president.
In 1959 three peace-enhancing European Communities were active: the 1952 Coal and Steel Community, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and the Economic Community (Common Market. The structure was changed in the 1980s when politicians replaced some still undeveloped democratic institutions with their own closed-door committees in what they called a European Union.
What was it that Schuman and Adenauer identified as USSR’s lethal fault when they 'watched world events'? What are the rules that lie behind the rise and fall of empires?
What should we be watching today based on it? What lessons can we learn about our own societies?
Here are some of the reflections, all still a little inconclusive. Some factors/ theories are presented to consider, analyze and comment on.
1. Why only one Communist country? I don’t know the exact or real answer for USSR. The question that has constantly to be raised about Soviet collapse is: what was different about the events and policy about the USSR that did not occur to two Communist States that did not collapse. North Korea – went on to make atomic weapons – and Communist China that went through convulsions but gained both nuclear weapons and now has an economic stranglehold on western economies.
2. Maturity. In 1959 USSR had existed 42 years. What changed? What was the negative development?
3. Law to prevent conflict. In June 1948 the USSR held the city of Berlin hostage by blocking transport across East Germany to Berlin’s Allied zones. Schuman came up with the idea of relieving the Berlin blockade by air. It was a way to avoid war over Berlin while insisting on the legality of the postwar treaties. In May 1949 USSR gave up and then allowed road traffic. USSR was by then active as a UN Security Council power, with means to influence world politics, especially during decolonization. It was forced to show some respect to international law and custom.
4. NATO. The difference between China and USSR is that Schuman and others created NATO in 1949 to defend Europe. That by its solidarity and assured Mutual Atomic Destruction blocked the intended Soviet take-over of Germany. The Soviets planned a move into Germany around 1950 – because US President F D Roosevelt had told Stalin that they would remove US troops from Europe by then.
5. Why was USSR different from China? USSR was therefore blocked from expansion. But why did it collapse and China and N Korea didn’t? How can this definite and inevitable collapse before the end of 1999 be predicted in 1959? What trend was clear forty years earlier? Here are some elements.
6. Strategic materials. One possible means of analysis: failure of strategic materials. In WW1 Germany’s leading industrialist Walther Rathenau warned in the early months that Germany would lose a long war because it lacked strategic materials. In WW2 Germany created ersatz substitutes for key goods but lacked gasoline (especially aviation fuel) in spite of trying to seize Russian and Romanian oil fields. Synthetic petroleum from coal was too costly. The global cartel controller, IG Farben, was building plants for additional synthetic fuel and rubber, Buna, at the three slave labor camps at Auschwitz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben The USSR had main resources of gas and oil and agriculture. What lack of strategic elements was obvious in 1959? I don’t know. (Putin in his doctoral thesis stresses how the Russian Federation should be built on energy and agricultural independence. The EU has taken a different approach to its shame.)
Cartels: IG Farben was expert in controlling sectoral and global cartels. Its directors told Allied intelligence officers after the war that they controlled Hitler, not vice versa. Schuman introduced the world's first international cartel-controlling agency in the European Coal and Steel Community, 1952.
Hitler's Germany opted for a policy of autarky, non-reliance on foreign trade and therefore freedom from blockades. The USSR initially set itself up as autarkic but this policy proved inadequate. The European Community is based on a single market for key materials used in warfare while protecting Member States from predatory foreign trade. Is his prediction based on the failure of classical economics in a modern age. He knew the Soviet economy would fail but what was the timing?
7. USSR technology advanced. The USSR was more advanced than China. It stole atomic secrets and exploded its first A-Bomb in 1947 but then developed its own very advanced program. In 1957 Schuman’s France and five other States created Euratom in the West that controlled fissile material and technologies against proliferation. That would only retard the inevitable development of weapons. It did not stop independent Soviet technology as the Soviet explosion in 1961 of the world’s largest H-bomb, the 50 Megaton ‘Tsar-Bomba’ proved. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project#Tsar_Bomba_(RDS-220) Defense yes, but other sectors were vulnerable like a termite attack. What were they?
8. Economic System. The Soviet defense industry was quite secret, undertaken in secret towns, and separate from the civilian economy. Consumer products economy was a much smaller economy than USA’s. It lacked a larger consumer base for industry compared with USA where the Defense industries drew from consumer industries and gave spin-offs to stimulate products. This does not explain why a collapse was obvious in 1950s. It only shows why citizens were poor. But they did not revolt.
9. Separation of Soviet economy in general from world economy. In the 1950s I bought a Soviet radio but it was clunky and not at all comparable with western transistor radios.
In 1989 I was part of a EU Commission team that went to an online conference and exhibition in Moscow. Because of dollar shortages, the Soviets wanted to trade whatever they had. They even offered their patent and inventions database for sale. But it was uncommercial because of technical incompatibilities and other issues. This was the treasure of treasures of Soviet science!
However this was before the internet was launched in the 1990s and databases were accessible only by interconnected data-networks with terminals. None of this, including the invention of the Internet, could have been foreseen in 1959. Nor was the disparity with USA a major issue under Stalin and a deciding issue of its collapse.
10. Lack of a free market currency. The Soviets had ‘coupons’ rather than a gold-backed currency. All means of production belonged to the Soviet State. Prices of goods were set by officials not by the free market competition. There was no free market, except a little in the fruit and vegetable market and second hand goods. Everything else was envisaged, ordered and produced by the Gosplan, central planning. How? Prices were set by mirroring western prices. Very inefficient, as they did not reflect real costs of material, quality control and labor in the USSR. In 1920 the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises showed that socialism is not a rational system and has built in inefficiencies in its aim to attack ‘the barbarism of capital rationality’. But does economic inefficiency have an intrinsic finality that would collapse it at the end of 1999? Not that I know of. It was propped up by devaluations of the ruble and Wall Street intervention (Antony Sutton
and Vodka Cola.)
The financing by Wall Street in the initial Revolution and the later postwar commercial trade with the West placed the USSR in a dollar dependency. It sold petroleum and any other goods it could but the addiction to western goods by the Nomaklatura, the new Ruling Class, was a time bomb that was certainly a factor in the demise of the USSR. Was it decisive? What was known of the problem in the 1950s?
After WW2 all European countries were devastated and in ruins. To reconstruct, all these countries needed dollars -- and the major problem of the immediate postwar period was the Dollar Shortage. The Marshall Plan was the solution to this and partly succeeded. Schuman, who was Finance Minister at the time, would have realized the acuteness of this addiction to dollars and the importance of free trade. It put enormous pressure on broken industries to export to the USA. France had its perfumes and fashion, but major capital was needed. The initial effect of the Marshall Plan was to make the European States more fiercely competitive against each other -- the opposite tendency for uniting Europe. That required a Single Market with economies of scale that Schuman introduced in 1952.
In the Soviet sphere some of the countries of Comecon had more access to western goods and this would have raised internal tensions.
Was the Soviet Dollar Dependency sufficient to bring down the USSR before 1999? How can it be assessed?
11. Human Rights. Schuman saw the key battle to be one of human rights of free speech and freedom of assembly. Freedom to criticize governments included the right to create non-Communist parties and the failures of Communist theory and practice and to worship openly and freely. France led the way in creating the Council of Europe. States had as entry obligation the signature of their democracies to the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Governments could be taken to Court. Governments were stopped violating their powers against citizens. The first major achievement was the adherence of West Germany – this prevented the revival of the strong pro-Nazi, pro-unification-first, nationalist parties from seizing power. It confirmed the Bonn democracy and isolated the DDR, East Germany. Yes, but how does this lead to the chronology of collapse prediction by 1999 and Adenauer’s grandchildren prediction? It is possible that he saw that subsequent generations became less militant and ideological. Hence the third generation would pose existential problems if they were not allowed to criticise the leadership and change it and were in fear of being sent to gulags.
12. Religious resistance. The Communists persecuted the Orthodox and the Jews but failed to wipe out their views. The Museum of Atheism did not explain the existence of moral laws that superseded any ideology. In science the Communists were forced to acknowledge that sciences like physics could not be twisted to form a 'Communist science' or a 'Soviet Science'. (Hitler banned Jewish science – which was why Einstein and many other scientists made an exodus.) What about 1999? Religious revival depends on a number of factors which are difficult to classify in terms of the chronology. Was the presence of a large Jewish minority, often persecuted, a factor in a predicted 1999 revolution? What of undeclared non-Orthodox Christians?
13. Prophecy. Both Adenauer and Schuman were devout Catholics. Was the prophecy of the three Fatima children (aged 9 to 6 years) important? Their vision of 'Mary' said that the pope must consecrate Russia to the sacred heart of Mary or their would be war and destruction. This first vision occurred in 1917 with later visions in following years. It gives no clue about the Soviet Union or a chronology. Various popes from Pius XII to Francis have done this 'consecration'.
Were other prophecies involved in Schuman's future chronology such as the Quatrains of Nostradamus.
Schuman was a realist, non-ideological politician not given to superstition. but he firmly believed in the spiritual dimension of history and politics. He was called a 'spiritual realist'. The fall of the USSR related to concrete, economic and political failures.
Did Schuman draw something out of the Bible that he read on a daily basis? It provides many sound ideas about vibrant democracy that were integrated into the American constitution.
14. Moral Renewal. The Communist party in Germany was very strong and hard-bitten comrades survived Hitler. They held to Stalin and the Communists represented a powerful and subversive political group after the war, ready for action. But many re-evaluated their ideology when faced with a serious confrontation by dedicated Christians of the moral re-armament movement, MRA. Both Schuman and Adenauer and a high percentage of French and German political and industrial society was involved in 'changing themselves, as a start to changing society'. MRA literature was circulated into the Soviet zone but the effect of it is difficult to ascertain. In Germany MRA activities had a decisive effect in bringing Germany to its present democracy. (I wrote a dissertation on this.)
15. Historic study. Schuman as a student of history and in particular the Declaration of Human Rights published during the French Revolution of 1789, and that of 1848, was well aware of the abuses of revolutions and their outcome. Revolutionists do not retain power for ever and corrections are inevitable to their abuse. Was this cycle part of the study that led Schuman to say the Soviet Union would collapse before the turn of the century?
16. Broken Bureaucracy. I nearly forgot. There was a French study I saw some years ago that analysed the sharp increase in deaths in Soviet hospitals. Why? The deaths were increasing because that health care was deteriorating. Thus the people lost confidence in the powers that be to care for them. I can't recall the years the study collected. But any dictatorship is only as good as its support. Which brings me to another thought...
17. Gulag releases. Stalin retained his power in the postwar period by fear. The WW2 soldiers that were returning having seen the West were eliminated because they could contaminate the socialist ideas and people would demand a decent life and consumer goods (that the system could not produce.) In the Stalin period people were sent to the Gulags not for offences specifically but because Stalin wanted a given number accused of crimes to keep the people in fear. His former colleagues confessed to crimes they had not committed. Mattias Desmet deals with this power of dictatorship and why people obey. He calls it Mass Formation. When Khrushchev took over he denounced Stalin and opened the Gulag prisons. (Some were brutalized and then returned home to normal life; others, a minority, were confirmed in their analysis that moral values were necessary for society before their release.) This showed that the mass psychosis or governmental control was breaking up. It was the beginning of the end. It was unlikely that a new Stalin would succeed though some hardened Communists thought they might. Hence a prediction of the end of the Soviet Union was possible based on these events.
Any other ideas that might fit?
What are relevant to self-analysis of the European Union in its present, disastrous, geostrategic policy?