The Collapse of the Center: Aspects of the Implosion of the Socio-Economic System in the Former Soviet Union and the Notion of Inevitability.
This paper will trace aspects of the centralizing process with reference to social and economic systems in an attempt to illustrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of sustaining the Soviet regime as it was. As such, it was only a matter of time before the U.S.S.R imploded, unable to maintain either the requisite coercion or economic controls to keep modernizing, nationalist, or secessionist forces under control. Special emphasis will be placed on events pertaining to the latter half of the twentieth century where the powerful center began to lose its grip on the union piecemeal. The focus of this paper will highly aspects of two central problems in the Soviet Union: first, the regional economic disparities; and second, the ethnic and nationalistic upheavals that brought the Soviet Union, already teetering precariously on the brink of collapse, to its final collapse. 6 pgs. 17 f/c. 10b.
