Paper on The Collapse of the Soviet Union and Its Impact on Eurasia Essay

Paper on The Collapse of the Soviet Union and Its Impact on Eurasia - Essay Example The states themselves had also to grapple with the realities of being on their own, and stitching new alliances with their neighbors and the rest of the world. Many of them saw internal revolutions, while others were content to let the status quo continue for sometime. Today, many of them have vibrant democracies and thriving economies, but this cannot be said of them all. The Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, or the USSR, was the world’s largest socialist state. When it was created in 1922, it comprised of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. By 1956, it comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Russia was the most powerful of these, and the one that controlled the union. Before the union was dissolved in 1991, it extended from the Arctic ocean to the Afghan border with a population of roughly 293 million. The Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics or the USSR comprised of fifteen republics that were made up of people of varied ethnicities and divergent nationalities. On the 25th. December 1991, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics was formally dissolved and the fifteen states that comprised the USSR became independent. This also marked the end of the cold war. Alth ough on the face of it, the downfall of the Soviet Union looked sudden, inexplicable and startling, some long term factors provided a slow and gradual decline in its power, while other short term factors provided the trigger that precipitated its collapse. By the 1980s the communist ideology was on the decline, and the idea of the state being "the leading and guiding force of Soviet life the nucleus of its political system, of all state organs and public organs," (Lewin, 1991) was being questioned. Vladimir Lenin’s revolutionary vision of a system