The Fall Of The Soviet Union In Eastern Europe: An Analysis

The fall of the Soviet Union brought about the largest social change in the 20st century. The dissolution of the Soviet Union has been formerly enacted on 26 December, 1991. As a consequence many former soviet countries converted their economies from the communist centrally planned economy model into the market-dominated economy mod-el. This transition results in a large social shift for the citizens of the former Soviet Un-ion, as capitalist ideals took hold in the general populace, despite the tremendous diffi-culty to enact social and economic change in these chaotic years. These former Soviet Union member states had each their own strategy to accomplish this monumental task, to achieve a stable economy which is able to grow and compete
An article (Poznanski, 2001) about some of these problems has evidence showing that for example Eastern European states such as Poland, have sold off their cap-ital without receiving the appropriate compensation for their value, alluding to corrupt practices in the auctions of state enterprises. in Russia itself we see the high extent of consolidation of capital into the hands of oligarchs as evidenced by Guriev and Rachinsky (2005), which could be identified as a consequence of bureaucratic corruption during the transition period in Eastern Europe. But despite the problems each country faces during the transitional period, there are definite strengths in each country’s (Russia and Poland) strategies and policies as evidenced by their high economic and political power compared to the other former Soviet Union
These topics will be the social and economic situation for the rural populace, as to determine the economic differ-ences between the people in these rural communities. This information will be obtained from the articles from for example Wegren (2004), who characterized by a highly adap-tive but small rich upper class, but a large majority of an unadapt able lower class living beneath the subsistence level (basic needs level). This will be compared to the rural communities in Poland, as an article sheds a similar picture as in Russia to a lesser de-gree, which are the findings by Buchowski (2003). Further topics for review are of the methods of privatisation and speed of privatising the industry, which has been specified by Hall & Elliott (1999) as to being the case of Poland a more gradual approach where the government is more involved in the transition of industry, whereas they say about that Russia took a relatively more quicker approach where the government relinquishes its industries to the markets as quickly as possible. And also a analyses of the literature available on the general economic and political structure of the nations and their econo-mies as mentioned earlier in the background about the findings of King (2002) for in-stance.
Further on in this study the proper comparisons will be set up between Russia and Poland