so by now you know that the Cold War was a long-standing tension in the 20th century between the United States and the Soviet Union but starting in the 1980s seemingly out of nowhere the Soviet Union just flat tumbled down the stairs crashed into the landing and then just collapsed and died so how in the fresh heck did that happen well that's what this video is all about so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to so in 1964 a guy named Leonid Brezhnev Rose to power in the Soviet Union and Brezhnev was a status quo kind of guy by his Reckoning the Soviet Union was just fine but in the late 60s and into the 70s economic realities began to contradict that estimation the Soviet people have been told over and over again that the Communist Utopia was just around the corner just just wait and it will come but instead of Soviet life improving it continued to get worse by the way is that National AP Euro exam is breathing down your neck then check out my AP Euro review pack which has exclusive videos and practice questions and practice tests it has everything you need to get a five on that exam you know if Brezhnev would have had that maybe the Soviet Union wouldn't have collapsed I mean anyway part of the economic trouble had to do with the way the Soviet economy was organized which is to say it was a planned economy that means the government made all the decisions about what jobs people had and what they made when they went to their job in a market economy consumers tell manufacturers what they wanted the manufacturers respond which is a very simplified way of talking about supply and demand but under the dictates of a planned economy it's the government who decides what is manufactured and what is not now in order to make such a centralized system work it required a huge bureaucracy of tens of thousands of people to implement by the 70s and 80s that bureaucracy was played with inefficiency and waste which led to a decline in worker productivity another part of the economic trouble was the malaise of workers in a planned economy there's precisely no incentive to work harder than is absolutely necessary since communism was Collective by Nature anyone who worked harder or innovated in any way saw The Spoils of that increased productivity and Innovation go to everyone else I had a way of discouraging hard work and Innovation and third crop failures in the early 70s plunged the Soviet Union even further into trouble now the Soviet Union is to use the technical term but cold and much of its land is not suitable for agriculture and that meant that crop failures were not uncommon but add to that reality a drought hit Europe in 1972 and the Soviet government was unable to feed its people and so to rectify that situation they turned to the last place you would imagine the United States no that's right me from that side of the screen they called up the United States their Chief rival in the Cold War and asked for grain so the Americans happy to be in the superior position said sure we'll let you buy 750 million dollars worth of grain on credit over three years but apparently things were so bad in the Soviet Union that they spent that 750 million in in one month like one month people so the point is things were not good in the Soviet Union during this time the people who were hungry and the economy had completely stagnant so into that economic stagnation a new leader emerged namely Mikhail Gorbachev Who Rose to power in 1982. now contrary to Brezhnev status quoery Gorbachev was a serious reformer by nature and although he was a communist through and through he was enough of a realist to understand that the way communism was being implemented was leading to disaster So to that end Gorbachev introduced two new categories of reform in the Soviet Union that would ultimately lead to its collapse the First Reform was called perestroika which was an effort to restructure the Soviet economy by introducing some limited free market for example under the perestroika reforms government price controls on many items were taken away and there was a move to allow more private property and you know initially these reforms saw some moderate success in staving off Soviet economic collapse but by 1988 the economy grew sluggish once again the second reform was called glasnose which is a word that means open under this reform Gorbachev wanted people to be able to speak freely about the problems facing the Soviet Union which was kind of a big deal after Decades of repression under previous leaders under this heading more than one candidate was allowed to compete for office political parties other than the Communist Party were legalized and those who had been imprisoned for speaking negatively about the party or the state were released and really you can see the extent of the openness when you consider what happened after one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century namely the explosion of a nuclear power plant in chernoby in April of 1986 one of the reactors exploded and sent massive amounts of radiation into the environment under previous leaders this would certainly have never been exposed to the outside world since it would communicate weakness on the part of the Soviet but under the rubric of glass notes almost daily Communications about the disaster were made now all that sounds great the Soviet Union is chilling out a little and leaving all the policies of past repression behind them here's where I remind you of what I said a minute ago namely that Gorbachev's reforms actually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union you see under the Iron Fist of previous authoritarian rulers ethnic tensions between many of the Soviet Union's various groups remain tamped down but even with just a little Breathing Room introduced by these reform forms those tensions flared up mightily when Gorbachev invited openness plenty of these ethnic minorities started protesting the Discrimination that they had experienced in the long years of Soviet Rule and in some cases that led to Violent conflict okay everybody let's just rain that opened his backhand everybody chilled but they patently did not chill and as a result of these people having freedom to express their pent-up desires a wave of nationalism spread throughout the Soviet Union in places like Georgia and Azerbaijan in the states of the Soviet Bloc and speaking of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 Gorbachev broke significantly with his predecessors and announced that the Soviet Union would no longer intervene militarily in those states to prop up their communist government and if that announcement revolts in Eastern Europe began almost immediately anyway a good example of this was the Polish elections of 1989. now Poland had always been kind of a problem for the Soviets they just didn't submit well to communist Rule and by 1989 a labor party called solidarity had led large-scale agitations against any attempt by the Soviets to repress their freedom in that year the Soviets finally agreed to legalize their party and allow for free election and that might seem like a risky proposition to you but to the Soviets who were enamored by communism like they thought there was no way that the Polish would vote out their communist leaders I mean I mean everybody in Poland loves communism right right but as it turned out solidarity candidates won the majority of the elections in that year and started the process of dissolving the bonds between Poland and the Soviet Union and maybe there is no more potent symbol of crumbling Soviet power than the fall of the Berlin Wall remember that this wall was erected by Stalin in 1961 to keep East berliners from fleeing to the Democratic West but by 1989 so many Germans had fled to the west and the Soviet government was flagged so finally the Border was opened and the Wall came down so ultimately all these factors combined along with a thousand complementary ones led to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. this of course officially ended the Cold War and also led to the establishment of capitalist economies and democratic governments throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc country more than that Germany was reunited at last Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia Yugoslavia broke into several ethnically defined states in the European Union which we'll talk about more in another video was enlarged by the entry of many new nations Okay click here if you want to keep reviewing for unit 9 of AP European History and click here to grab my AP Euro review pack which is everything you need to get an A in your class and a five on your exam in May and I'll catch you on the flip flop heimler out