By what point was the Soviet Union's fall inevitable?

[Heimdal]

It was probably obvious from 1945 that the Soviet Union would face significant challenges. Alongside the US, they emerged from World War 2 as a superpower. But it had come at a very steep price. The Russians had fought the bulk of the Wehrmacht, and lost many millions of men and women in the prime of their youth. Of the men born between 1920 and 1923, I think just 2-3 % survived the war.

Initially their planned economy was able to deliver increasing standards of living for most Russians, to the point that most people had their own apartments, stable jobs and access to food. But they were never able to produce enough consumer goods. This was a shortage induced by the Soviet government. The Soviet economy was an economy geared to a fight another war, and the production of television sets, refrigerators and microwave ovens had no place in such a system. The great flaw of the planned economy was that they didn’t have functioning price signals. The lack of a price system meant that the Soviet economy would be riddled with inefficiency and contradictions, which would only grow worse.  So their economic system was probably doomed from the outset.

I think an incredibly important event was the failed war in Afghanistan. The Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe rested on the threat of a Soviet intervention. The military disaster in Afghanistan showed that the Red Army didn’t have the capability to fight and win wars on hostile territory, against a determined enemy. By the late 1980s the Soviet leadership also lacked the will to send the Red Army to enforce the will of the Kremlin. At that point their empire in Central- and Eastern Europe was doomed to crumble.

Gorbachow’s actions in the last half of the 1980s were also important in this respect. He dismantled a lot of the security apparatus that previous Soviet leaders had used to destroy internal dissent. After that point the fall of the USSR was inevitable.

Important events were also the Soviet interventions in Budapest in 1956, and Prague in 1968. In 1945 a lot of people in Western and Eastern Europe believed that communism represented the future. Very few people believed that by the late 1960s. The Soviet intervention in Budapest and Prague had demonstrated that Soviet communism couldn’t be reformed or humanized. By the early 1970s it was dead as a political project.