Answer:
freedom
Explanation:
Ultimately, the deepest causes of the Soviet collapse were the decline of communist ideology and economic failure. This would have happened even without Gorbachev. In the early Cold War, communism and the Soviet Union had considerable soft power. Many communists led the resistance against fascism in Europe and many people believed that communism was the wave of the future.
But Soviet soft power was undercut by the exposure of Stalin's crimes in 1956 and by the repression in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1981.
Although in theory communism aimed to establish a system of class justice, Lenin's heirs maintained domestic power through a brutal security apparatus involving lethal purges, gulags, broad censorship and ubiquitous informants. The net effect of these brutal measures was a general loss of faith in the system.
The Soviet economy's decline, meanwhile, reflected the diminished ability of central planning to respond to global economic change. Stalin had created a command economy that emphasised heavy manufacturing and smokestack industries, making it highly inflexible—all thumbs and no fingers.
As the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, capitalism is "creative destruction", a way of responding flexibly to major waves of technological change. At the end of the 20th century, the major technological change of the third industrial revolution was the growing role of information as the scarcest resource in an economy.
The Soviet system was particularly inept at handling information. The deep secrecy of its political system meant that the flow of information was slow and cumbersome.
Economic globalisation created turmoil throughout the world at the end of the 20th century, but the Western market economies were able to reallocate labour to services, restructure their heavy industries and switch to computers. The Soviet Union could not keep up.
Indeed, when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, there were 50,000 personal computers in the Soviet Union; in the United States, there were 30 million. Four years later, there were about 400,000 personal computers in the Soviet Union, and 40 million in the US.
