Soviet Union Weaknesses

This essay will first introduce the background of the Soviet Union and its empire before 1985; it will then investigate its weaknesses, which will be divided into economic, military, political and social aspects, and finally concluding with how these weaknesses contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union before its collapse had faced various issues both internal and external. Internally it faces political issues that deteriorated the development of the economy; externally it faces foreign military challenges, especially from the US, how these problems together contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union will be explained in this essay.
The Soviet Union was well known as a Great Power regarding its economy, especially for its widespread land
Despite owning over one-sixth of the total surface of the earth and a border across eleven time zones, the Soviet Union had its weaknesses and was unable to utilize its natural resources and manpower due to multiple reasons. As suggest by commentators , there had been inefficiencies in systems of planning, lack of automated machinery and modern equipment, poor quality of vocational programmes, loss of manpower caused by absenteeism and poor labour discipline. It was also evident that the low labour productivity and high level of dismissal and reassignment of labour contributed to the reducing economy growth rate. “Labour hoarding” was a phenomenon exceptionally common in the Soviet Union, which became a huge obstacle to the Soviet improvement in production together with absenteeism. This, altogether, had led the Soviet Union into economic stagnation when it became a large importer of grain from the United States a decade ago. The economy of Soviet Union did not recover from the collectivization of agriculture as output in 1982 remains the same as that in 1973, and the economy growth was reduced significantly to only 3% . It was suggested by Dyker