Why Are The Former USSR And Contemporary NIS Of Interest To Me?

Why Are The Former USSR And Contemporary NIS Of Interest To Me?



Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to discuss that why I am interested in the economical history and issues of Former USSR and Contemporary NIS. Throughout the Soviet period, the economic weight of the USSR was overvalued. My particular area of interest in Former USSR and Contemporary NIS is the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 which lead to an abrupt end to the socialist system which had shaken the Russian economy and led to profound changes in all sectors of the economy. The decline of the Russian economy, which began in the last years of the Soviet period, was abruptly accelerated. The Soviet Communist model has always been considered since its inception in the 20s as an alternative to the liberal model. But Stalin's dictatorship established a strict control over the population and intellectual life. After the war, there has been an expansion of the model around the world especially in Eastern Europe, which quickly became a replica copy of the Soviet model, except in one country, Yugoslavia (Ticktin, 1992).

The economic collapse of the Soviet Union took place in the late 1980s. In a relatively short time, the Soviet economy experienced very important changes that actually produced their own formal dissolution as a political unit with Belavezha agreements, signed by the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus . The former USSR led to several independent countries, all of which experienced very severe contractions in their economies in transition to capitalism.



Discussion and Analysis

Former USSR and Contemporary NIS's liberalization of the economy was accompanied by a severe economic and social crisis. The political and economic transformations have led to the breakdown of traditional trading networks and disruption of production. Trade between Russia and the republics of the former USSR and the former people's democracies in Europe declined sharply from the late 1980s, when Eastern Europe countries freed themselves of the tutelage of Moscow and the Soviet control over the trade and production began to disintegrate. After World War II, the growth of the Soviet economy was fast enough to give credence to forecasts of Nikita Khrushchev that the standard of living in the USSR would have surpassed the U.S. before 1970, and that capitalism would buried before the end of the current century. But on the eve of perestroika in the early 1980s, there were strong indications that some aspects of the economy did not work well (Barber, 1991).

Initially after the formation of the Soviet economy, the history of the 20th century is interpreted by many left-wing radical social scientists as progressive socialism and reactionary capitalism. In contrast, it advocates a market economy which declared Soviet socialism as the road to serfdom.

Major reforms have been undertaken since 1992 to put the Russian economy on the road to a market economy which leads to capitalism and free enterprise, denationalization, liberalization of prices, privatization of large public companies, ...