Late Soviet Conservatism

Abstract

This chapter examines conservatism toward the fall of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform the Soviet system politically and economically through the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) failed. In the late 1980s, the situation in the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate. Political opposition to communism grew rapidly, especially among some of the country's non-Russian national minorities. The three Baltic republics demanded independence. The Soviet Union teetered closer to the brink of collapse, triggering a conservative backlash among those wanting to preserve what they could of the existing order. This reached its culmination in August 1991 in a failed coup d'état against Gorbachev. Following this, the communist system disintegrated extremely quickly, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.