The Fall of the Soviet Union
“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This quote from Ronald Reagan has become a widely recognized line that signified the impending collapse of the Soviet Union (On the Media). Ever since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR, collapsed in 1991 historians have been hotly debating its tremendous fall from power (Fall). After all, the Soviet Union, with the United States of America, was considered one of the two super powers of the world and ever since the end of the Second World War, America and the USSR had been stuck in a constant war of ideology, technology, and power (Fall). Some historians point the figure at Reagan, who took a staunch stance against Soviet Russia, but to give him all of the credit would be foolish. Others believe that the Soviet Union was simply worn too thin from many years of an arms race and military operations that drained the nation economically and lowered moral. However, upon a closer inspection, there is not just one event or reason that caused the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to fall. Though the Soviet Union did not technically collapse until 1991 (Fall), the events leading to its fall goes back almost a hundred years to the very rise of the revolution that would put a communist government into place. The very core of these ideas slowly worked away at the soul of the system leading to its ultimate destruction. The Soviet Union collapsed due to the nation’s low productivity caused by failing technological policies and the system of purging or killing “political enemies. These themes can all be found and backed up throughout Loren Graham’s book, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union.
The theme of Loren Graham’s book is that of an engineer, Peter Palchinsky, who was very critical towards many of the Soviet Union’s policies. For these beliefs, Palchinsky was taken prisoner and later executed (Graham). Was Peter Palchinsky right however? If so would the Soviet Union still be around if they would have taken his criticism, and that of others, to change and improve? Maybe, but that, we will never know. Throughout Peter Palchinsky’s short life, he witnessed three major technological disasters that failed due to unwillingness by the nation’s leaders to listen.
The first major disaster was that of the Dnieper Dam Power Plant. Peter Palchinsky, and many other engineers had repeatedly warned Soviet Russia not to rush the building and development of the Dnieper Dam. Studies had shown that the water flow of this damn would be much to slow and the flowing patterns of the water both on surface and underground was unsuitable for the use in a dam (Graham). However, the USSR was not in a listening mood. Therefore the project continued, and just as Peter Palchinsky predicted, it was an utter disaster. To build this dam, the USSR pushed approximately ten thousand farmers off of their land. To build this power plant, the USSR often forced citizens to work on the project. Due to the major lack of planning and disregard to criticisms, the plant’s construction quickly fell behind schedule and greatly exceeded the project’s budget (Graham). In a total lack of respect for basic human rights the power plant’s workers were forced to live and work in terrible conditions that also contributed to the inefficiency of the construction (Graham). The Dnieper Dam Power Plant has since been destroyed, rebuilt, and expanded upon many times.
The next major blunder mentioned in The Ghost of the Executed Engineer Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union, was the construction at Magnitogorsk. In the year 1929, the Soviet Union began construction at Magnitogorsk, promising a “garden city” for the people. Peter Palchinsky however did not support this construction. In fact three years prior Palchinsky published an article criticizing the Soviet Unions’ construction plans. In 1927, Palchinsky wrote another piece expressing his concerns once more (Graham). In his articles, Palchinsky argued that the Soviet Union had not done proper research on the regions geological resources, labor availability, transportation economics, or come up with a suitable plan for work force housing (Graham). Upon completion of the Magnitogorsk project citizens found that they did not get the “garden city” they were promised.
Figure 1.0 Magnitogorsk after Completion
In fact, Magnitogorsk turned out to be the complete opposite by the time the project was finished. As seen in Figure 1.0, Magnitogorsk ended up being an industrial city devoid of gardens of any sort.
The third and perhaps the most atrocious example provide in Graham’s book is that of White Sea Canal construction. Palchinsky was, once again, an outspoken critic of the White Sea Canal’s construction (Graham). Yet once more, the Soviet Union ignored Palchinsky and all of his engineering principles. During the construction of the White Sea Canal, the waterways would freeze up during the winter and during the summer the waterways would dry-up. Due to these extreme conditions, more than two hundred thousand workers died during the construction of the canal. After these huge casualties, massive expenses, and allocation of resources, the canal was deemed a failure after World War 2 (Graham). The canal would later be rebuilt in a new location.
These three scenarios all revealed one massive weakness with the Soviet Union’s mindset. Despite their large amount of resources, population, and power, the USSR lacked even a basic level of productivity. The leaders of the Soviet Union’s refusal to take advice led to failed projects and wasted money and resources that could have been allocated elsewhere. If they would have listened to Peter Palchinsky’s criticism then perhaps these projects would not have been the epic failures that they were. How could the Soviet Union expect to have a high productivity rate when they cannot even effectively construct basic infrastructure projects such as dams and power plants?
These failed projects also had a tremendous negative effect on the people of Soviet Russia. As previously stated, the government would force people off of their land, put people into forced labor, and force those people to work in inhuman conditions, often leading to a high casualty rate. Such practices undoubtedly lowered the moral of the Russians. After all, nobody likes to be pushed off of their land and abused. According to an article on PositiveSharing.com, entitled Top 10 reasons why happiness at work is the ultimate productivity booster,” backed by the research of Teresa Amabile, a professor at the Harvard Business School (The Power), states that happiness is one of the largest contributing factors to productivity (Top Ten).
Figure 2.0 – Happiness Increases Productivity
Figure 2.0, show above, is a simple chart which is “dumbed down” to clearly express the significance of being happy while working (Top Ten). PositiveSharing.com does a lot of writing on this subject matter and the owner, Alexander Kjerulf, is considered an expert in the field. Mr. Kjerulf spends a lot of his time consulting businesses and giving presentations to managers about boosting productivity simply by making their employees happier in the workplace (Top Ten).
With such inhuman and miserable working conditions, it is no wonder that every project implemented by the Soviet Union was such a huge failure. From the start every single aspect of these projects were done incorrectly. Expert advice from Peter Palchinsky, and others, was ignored and workers were forced to work and live in terrible conditions. After one failure the Soviet Union did not change their policies.
In fact, other similar bad policies were made, such as the collectivization of farms, throughout the Soviet Union. Lenin saw private farming as a threat to the communistic ideology that Russia was building its policies on. Therefore a policy of farm collectivization was implemented throughout most of Soviet Russia (Famine). The idea behind collectivization was that farming would be more effective and efficient if ran by the government and put into mass plots instead of many individual and smaller plots of land (Famine). However, once again, the leaders of the Soviet Union were wrong. Farmers were forced to work in unbearable conditions that killed an estimated three million people. The government of the USSR was also well known to interfere in the daily farming operations which built up resentment from the farmers. To show their displeasure, many farmers would break equipment or even totally destroy the crops they were growing (Famine). An article by Hedrick Smith, published in The Russians, in 1976, cited statistics that showed that 25% of the crop production of 1973 was grown on private land plots that peasants were allowed to retain (Smith). What is even more remarkable is that these private land plots made up less than 2% of the total land suitable for crop production in Russia. Once again the Soviet Union was continuing down a path of failed policy and human right violations which rendered them totally inefficient with a low rate of productivity (Smith). This horrifying trend would continue throughout the entire reign of the Soviet Union so it is no wonder that the USSR would eventually fail as it was slowly crumbling from within.
During Stalin’s reign as the leader of the Soviet Union, an estimated ten million Russians were killed in what is now known as the Great Purge (Gendercide). During this purge nobody was safe from the threat of immediate execution or that of being sent to one of the many Gulags, or death camps as they are often referred to, throughout the wilderness of Siberia. In the year 1938 approximately eight million “enemies of the state” were detained in these Gulags. Figures have shown that of these eight million detainees only 10% survived (Gendercide). During this time frame, up to one million individuals were directly executed by the state. Social status and political beliefs meant nothing in the USSR’s purges and nearly every family was affected through this systematic method of wiping out all threats to Russia (Gendercide). In most cases all charges brought up were entirely fraudulent. Most often, the victims were charged with various political crimes such as; espionage, sabotage, conspiring coups, and anti-Soviet agitation (Gendercide).
In the case of Peter Palchinsky he was charged with acting against the interest of the Soviet Union. As mentioned earlier, Peter Palchinsky was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union’s handling of vital internal engineering projects, human rights, and infrastructure (Graham). Palchinsky was in fact a supporter of many of the Soviet Union’s original policies, but as time went on his support began to fade as the system repeatedly made the same mistakes (Graham). In April of 1928 Peter Palchinsky was arrested for his criticism of government policies. His wife would never see him again and within a year Peter was executed by a firing squad (Graham). In the time leading up to Palchinsky’s execution, the Soviet Union would publish multiple forms of anti-Palchinsky propaganda demonizing him for his beliefs (Graham).
So how did these purges cause the Soviet Union to collapse? A quote from The Great Terror: A Reassessment explains this matter perfectly,
“The snowball system [of accusations] had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists,” and the proportion of the entire Soviet population arrested had reached one in every twenty. “One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail,” proportions that were “far higher among the educated classes. … Even from Stalin’s point of view, the whole thing had become impossible. … To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed.” Stalin now eased the pressure, dismissing Yezhov from his post (he would subsequently be executed) and declaring that “grave mistakes” had occurred, though on balance the results of the Purge “were beneficial” (Conquest 289-290, 440).
This passage highlights the strain that was being pushed onto the Soviet Union due to the policy of purging a large percentage of its population. The purge came at a great cost to the Soviet Union. The cost gradually began to add up from the trials, prisoner transportation, payments for the police force, camp operations, and more (Conquest). This great purge also left Russia without a lot of its top thinkers and innovators. People of higher intelligence and job levels were often targeted as their skills were seen as a threat to the nation (Gendercide). This was the case with Palchinsky as well. He was an engineer and could have been considered an expert in that field. The Soviet Union however did not want people thinking for themselves or to contradict their way of running things. Therefore everybody who could be considered a threat was swiftly taken care of. The Soviet Union even went as far to purge around thirty thousand members of the Red Army including most of the high ranked officials (The Great Purge). Near the end of the purges, Stalin would have several members of his secret police force executed as well to prevent them from divulging too much information on the inside workings of these mass killings (The Great Purge). The army was left in shambles, the workforce annihilated, and all skilled innovators and scientists killed. The Soviet Union once again was putting a lot of strain on its core once again.
By 1991, the Soviet Union had been through almost one hundred years of these failed policies. Yes there were a lot of contributing factors to the Soviet Union’s fall from power, but in the end the real cause was the low productivity and purges that ate away at the empire’s foundation. A nation can only go so much in debt and waste so many resources before the consequences begin to arise. By 1991, the people of the Soviet Union were ready for change and calling for freedom. By 1991, the Soviet Union was collapsing upon itself and the “evil empire,” as Reagan so eloquently phrased it was nearly over. The Bolshevik Revolution that changed the face of the world was coming to an end and a new era of prosperity was unfolding in Russia.

