Top 5 mistakes the Soviet Union made.

Focusing only on what's been said in this read since its revival (i.e. late 2012):

1. Regarding Brezhnev, here is something I wrote earlier, that I feel is relevant here:

Quote:

For all the flack he gets about allowing cadres to decompose in their chairs, it was under him that the USSR achieved strategic parity with the US, and began in a more serious and reasoned way to support liberation struggles throughout the world. It has to be remembered as well that living standards during his tenure rose in a major way. Though Suslov reduced the number of openings for anti-communist criticism, the country never reverted to a totalitarian society, and the 'genius age' of Soviet cinema occurred under Brezhnev. His personality and approach to foreign affairs also facilitated detente, and he was a smooth and charismatic negotiator. The signing of the Helsinki Final Act also ensured the maintenance of peace in Europe to this day (except in Yugoslavia, but that was after the USSR collapsed). It should also be remembered too that the lifeblood of the Russian economy in the form of oil and natural gas pipelines from Siberia were also laid mostly in Brezhnev's time. Nuclear icebreakers, space stations, quality heavy and light transport production, machine-building tools exported all around the world, the BAM railroad, construction of hundreds of thousands of modern apartments, a growing and more and more educated population, all of this was facilitated by Brezhnev's leadership. It's not for no reason that the Brezhnev era is known as the Soviet Union's 'golden' period -peace, more freedom, rising living standards. Overall, I think if he had retired in 1977 after the 60th anniversary of October and the signing of the constitution he would be remembered on par with Stalin among the masses among the 20th century's best Soviet/Russian vozhds, perhaps even better, because Brezhnev had no problem with any ethnic group, and didn't have so many people, innocent or not, killed. He did actually signal his wish to retire in 1976, writing a letter to the Politburo and asking to be relieved of his duties. He was convinced to stay however, the Politburo fearing that his leaving would begin a major political war among its circles...

2. Soviet military spending is difficult to measure, given that the country had a planned economy which made valuations difficult. In the late 1980s the leadership publicly commented that about 15% of GDP was spent on the military, but this doesn't measure that
a) the majority of the armed forces were comprised of conscripts -who served for free.
b) the military is said to have controlled some of the best quality light industry factories for their own use (for the production of things like uniforms, electronics, etc.). This theoretically means that these factories' goods weren't available to the general public, although in reality many of them worked producing consumer and military goods simultaneously
c) Soviet valuations of cost of things -from a fighter jet to a baby's bottle, were different from a market-based valuation. This is due to the system of economic indicators (much disputed here when discussing if/when the USSR became revisionist, whether it was state capitalist, etc.) where the factory-level profit indicator was only one among many.
Therefore, in some ways it could be said that the USSR a highly militarized country, with tens of millions in reserves, mandatory school military education courses, contingency plans to turn virtually any factory to military production, etc. On the other hand, because of free service, the calculation problems mentioned above, and the statements by the government mentioning figure of 15% of the state budget, it would be erroneous to say that the military swallowed up so much that it bankrupted the country.

On to Stalin:
1. The purges did negatively affect the USSR's initial situation in the war, though on the other hand there is evidence to indicate that some officers, including Tuchachevsky, really may have been plotting against Stalin for an officer's coup of sorts. There are some contemporary Russian scholars who theorize that even Timoshenko and Zhukov were involved in this to some extent, but that's being debated. Secondly, it's important to note that a majority of those purged were political officers, and though their fate is tragic, it's doubtful that it played such an important role in the loses of the first months of the war. Finally, it's important to recognize that many of those purged were officers going back to the Civil War period, and hence their strategic thinking and tactical behaviour could be said to have been dangerously out of date. The surviving Marshal Budenny was proof of this. After his disastrous leadership in the first few months, he served out the remainder of the war in the rear.

2. The post-war situation and the lead up to the Cold War was as much if not more the fault of the West than of Stalin. In Stalin's initial conception the countries of Eastern Europe didn't even have to be socialist -just constitutionally neutral and friendly to the USSR. He wanted Germany neutral and united. His ideologically motivated thinking convinced him for a period that any future global conflict would be between capitalist European powers and the United States, and that the USSR had need to maintain its military potential only to prevent any future imperialist war from penetrating the USSR. Hence despite his growing paranoia toward the West in the late 1940s (fully justified, I might add) there was nothing that he specifically did to initiate the Cold War.

Re: Afghan War: This 'became' an important mistake/reason for collapse only after the fact.


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By the way, I can really agree with Tropican's contributions here. The points about glasnost and the need to invent a Western style propaganda apparatus in particular are really important in my view, because the ideological war was in the end an information war. When one side gives up and starts playing against themselves in a neverending cycle of self-shaming and ridicule while the other is ramping up its information warfare capacities to never-before seen levels (with a famous Hollywood Actor at the helm, I might add) - that's when the USSR truly lost the Cold War. runequester's point about computerization is also important, given that the USSR had the brains, the ideas, and the technology to do it.