10.12.2021, Moscow.
The turning point in the disintegration of the Soviet Union should be sought not in the 1991 Belovezh Accords, but in the 70s of the 20th century, a leading researcher of the Russian State University for the Humanities, Doctor of Historical Sciences Mikhail Mukhin said in his commentary to Rossa Primavera News Agency on December 10.
The historian recalled that the conflicts in the territory of the USSR – in Karabakh, Sumgait, Fergana Valley, Transnistria – began when the Soviet Union formally existed. And if one poses a question about the turning point in history, when it was possible to avoid all these unfortunate events, one must look at the events of the second half of the 60s – the first half of the 70s.
“I am firmly convinced that it was then that the Soviet elite missed all chances to save the Soviet Union,” Mukhin emphasized.
He explained that in the second half of the 1960s the country two options for development were considered. It was either the so-called Kosygin reform (after the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Aleksey Kosygin), with the “implementation of the then version of the self-financing, greater independence of enterprises, reducing reporting.” or improvement of the planned economy through the introduction of the Nationwide Automated System of Accounting and Information Processing (NAS).
“These two options were discussed and debated. The end result is that the NAS program is actually curtailed, and Kosygin’s reform, having begun, was just as without prior arrangement curtailed,” says Mukhin.
The expert noted that although there was no official decree to curtail the Kosygin reform, but de facto “its main provisions have been scrapped.”
“By and large, somewhere in the first half of the 70s, the Soviet elite decided ‘it will do, enough for our age, and why do we need to change something, we are satisfied with everything.” And so as soon as they said “we are satisfied with everything, they signed the sentence to the Soviet Union,” the historian concluded.
December 8 2021 marks 30 years since the signing of the Belovezh Accords.
At that time Boris Yeltsin, Stanislav Shushkevich, and Leonid Kravchuk signed the agreement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Union of Independent States in the Belarusian sanatorium “Viskuly”. On December 25 of the same year, President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the destruction of the country’s industrial and scientific potential, a drop in the standard of living, the birth rate, and an increase in mortality. Population losses in the 1990s were comparable to those of the Great Patriotic War.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
