GeoMag

L AY E R S O F T H E S O V I E T U N I O N

CHARLES WADDINGTON

LAYERS OF THE SOVIET UNION

The Soviet Union, a socialist state, stood from 1922 to 1991. It had land in both Asia and Europe, dominant on the global map with the expansive area it maintained and its immense 293 million population, ranking third largest in the world in 1991. As the Union collapsed completely in 1991 due to economic stagnancy, over-stretched military and public dissatisfaction of a collective economy, new countries started to appear on the map, creating a reformed and layered global picture. Coming out of a long period ruled by Communism in the Union for the prior seventy years or so, the development of the post-Soviet countries was far behind that of the Western European countries. In an effort to begin catching up, twelve of the fifteen countries signed up to the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. With its creation, the intergovernmental organisation encouraged cooperation in economic, political and military affairs between members, softening the impact of previous total interdependency on the Soviet Union. It remains in place to this day but, throughout the years, has lost three member states. Those who didn’t sign, the Baltic states, managed to achieve membership in the European Union and NATO instead, pushing their economies and living standards towards those of the West much more quickly than their fellow post-Soviet nations. Economic stability and improvement were hugely important when the Soviet Union dissolved. Making sure the newly independent states could survive individually was the key priority for their leaders. The majority of them transitioned from a command economy, one where governments own the factors of production to reach a social objective, as used in the USSR, to a market economy, one where private ownership is used as the means of production to reach a profit objective. Russia’s capitalist economy was 70% privatised by the middle of 1994. However, in the aftermath of such a drastic shift, each country’s gross domestic products fell significantly and triggered a severe economic decline. Armenia’s GDP fell by 59.3% and Russia’s by 44.7% in the first few years spent out of the Union. The post-Soviet republics lacked institutional capacity to tackle the new economic challenges. Corruption also stood a big economic challenge and still stands one to this

28 | Geographical Magazine • Merchant Taylors’ School

2021/22 Edition | 29