The Fall of the USSR, Pt I

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh Clark** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And we're just a few Cold War kids working out our ongoing fascination with the Soviet Union.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:23)
That's right. This is a man. It's been a long time since we've done a two-parter. I was trying to remember the last time we did this.

**Josh Clark** (0:30)
Probably ADHD.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:32)
Yeah, maybe. I'm weirdly excited by a two-parter for some reason.

**Josh Clark** (0:36)
Yeah, it is a little weird.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:38)
It feels like less work, even though it's not.

**Josh Clark** (0:42)
It's fun also to tackle something and really understand it even further, you know?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:47)
No, I totally agree. Smashing this into a single 45-minute episode would have short-shrifted it, I think.

**Josh Clark** (0:54)
You know what we did? We scored it with a sickle and then smashed it down the middle with a hammer. Wow.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:01)
Look at you.

**Josh Clark** (1:02)
Yeah. So we are talking about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, for some reason the CCCP in Russia, Soviet Russia.
I mean, how many times are we going to do Yakov Smirnov in this episode?

**Chuck Bryant** (1:19)
I'm going to try not to do it once.

**Josh Clark** (1:21)
No. Well, you do a better Yakov Smirnov than me, so I hope you will.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:25)
Although Branson, the very nicest time of year.

**Josh Clark** (1:27)
There you go.
So, yeah, and in the, I think the, basically 1990 to the very beginning of 1992, this superpower, one of two superpowers in the world, the way that the world was aligned was based on these two superpowers. One of them just fell over and was gone in the blink of an eye.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:53)
Like really quickly.

**Josh Clark** (1:55)
Yeah, I mean, like, just breathtakingly fast, it went away and not just the country, this superpower, but also the Soviet Communism itself. It was just gone, Chuck, just gone.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:11)
Gone. And the end of an ideal, the end of a Cold War, like it was, I can't think of anything that was bigger since the end of World War II, geopolitically. Like, this had to be the biggest thing.

**Josh Clark** (2:26)
I think absolutely for sure. The best part about it, though, at least as far as the world was concerned, it didn't take a nuclear World War III to bring the Cold War and the bipolar, I guess, orientation of the world to an end.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:45)
Yeah. And it was a top-down thing. Like, it wasn't an uprising. Although, as we'll see, like, on the Eastern Bloc, there were definitely some uprisings and things that happen. It was a result, but the whole thing started as a top-down thing because of one guy, because of Mikhail Gorbachev. Is it Gorbachev? I always said Gorbachev.

**Josh Clark** (3:05)
It was, I always heard both throughout our youth.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:07)
All right, great. So I'll just say both.

**Josh Clark** (3:10)
I'm just gonna call him Gorby.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:12)
Yeah, that's right. It was because of a series of decisions that he made to not fully westernize the Soviet Union, but to loosen the reinsome, to get a little capitalism in there, to get a little more transparency, relax the reins on the hard fist of the Soviet regime, to kind of just have a newer, sort of softer Soviet Union moving forward. And boy, I don't know if he didn't fully think it through or if it was just the domino effect was so fast. I'm sure he was probably like, wow, I didn't think this was going to happen.

**Josh Clark** (3:54)
Yeah, he's just standing there looking guilty while the whole room has just fallen down around him because he touched something he wasn't supposed to, kind of.

**Chuck Bryant** (4:03)
Yeah, for sure. But it all sort of started with these two major reforms that he set out to establish, which was, in Russian, it would be Perestroika and Glasnod. But to us, that would be restructuring and transparency. And I guess we should talk about the restructuring first.

**Josh Clark** (4:24)
Yeah, Perestroika.
One more thing I do want to say about Gorbachev, though, before we move on, is I didn't see anything anywhere that suggested that this was secretly purposeful. I think you're absolutely right. I think he was completely taken off guard by the consequences of these pretty legitimate and good ideas at the time, because Gorbachev inherited a USSR that was in deep stagnation by the mid-1980s, right? Yeah. It was a planned economy and it had been moving along in that direction for decades. But by this time, by the 80s, it was just, it was not in good shape. And so, like you said, to kind of like jumpstart the socialist economy, not replace it, but to jumpstart it, he was willing to implement some Western style free market ideas. Yeah.