Who Did Soviet Collapse Benefit?
When many people hear the words "Soviet Union" or "communism," their minds jump to images of a ruthless dictator, starving masses, or gulag prison camps filled with millions of regular citizens. Hollywood and Western textbooks ( Constructed and revised under billionaire families such as the Rockefellers and Rothschilds) have painted the USSR as nothing but a gulag of tyranny, ignoring and diminishing its victories for humanity, it’s strategic understanding of the people's united resilience in class and of course the true reasons for its collapse. This deliberate distortion of the USSR has served and will continue to serve the Bourgeois class by conditioning the masses that work for them to believe that this rich history be deemed anything other than.
The Soviet Union did face a fair share of challenges before and during the Cold War (similar to all nations). These challenges include the tragic famine of 1932-1933, caused partly by drought, Kulak sabotage, and rapid industrialization policies. To provide context on what a kulak is. "Kulak," translates to "fist" in Russian, originally referred to wealthy peasant farmers in rural communities who accumulated wealth through land ownership and labor. The Communist Party planned to merge the small farms in each village into a large collective farm called a kolkhoz for the workers to be ahead of all production sites. Many peasants, but especially the Kulaks, were reluctant to join the cooperative farms, so these mergers proceeded slowly. In 1927, due to Kulaks violence and sabotage causing the death of and starvation towards their workers, Stalin declared the Kulaks enemies who opposed the government. This lead many to selling off their livestock, machines and giving up their land to avoid being labeled a Kulak.’ "Kulak." Research Starters: Military History and Science*, EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/kulak.
The claim that "Communism killed millions" is deceptive verbiage we hear much too often, when the reality of what that person is speaking of is summing up a war against Nazis into a quick vague immoral title that quickly weaponizes the masses empathy as now most would feel morally incorrect to study deeper into what the Soviet revolution was truly about, let alone celebrate the Soviets momentous win. Let’s deep dive into who the millions in question the Soviet Union killed. 5.5 million Nazis were estimated in being taken out during World War II by Soviet soldiers — however, in comparison the Nazi regime caused 40–50 million deaths total, including: 24–27 million Soviets (8–11 million military, 13–15 million civilians), 6 million Jews, 1.8–3 million non-Jewish Poles, 1 million+ Yugoslavs, 250,000–500,000 Romani, 250,000+ disabled and LGBTQIA+ victims, and 1–2 million other Europeans—fueled by policies like the Hunger Plan (starving 2–4 million Soviets) and Generalplan Ost (Slavic extermination). Soviet POWs faced 57% mortality versus 4% for Western POWs (Snyder, 2010; USHMM, 2023; Russian MOD, n.d.).
It was because of Communism, led by Stalin, Lenin, and countless revolutionary heroes like Zhukov and Kirov that were able to lead the Red Army against the Nazi reigme to liberate Auschwitz, storm Berlin, and raise the red flag over the Reichstag. While the U.S. Goverment hesitated to join until 1941 following the Pearl Harbor attack. The Soviet people, under Socialist planning, Marxist Leninist Dialectics, and a working class party not only defeated Nazism but were able to rebuild their nation from empire rubble into a global superpower that achieved nuclear parity, won the Space Race, and provided guaranteed employment, housing, and education for all its citizens after centuries of Imperial powers ruling. These feats only make the betrayal of the 1991 collapse more tragic to the working class.
So why, then, is the collapse of the USSR celebrated as a triumph of "freedom?” The answer can be found in who has been benefiting from their downfall. The U.S. and Western powers profited enormously from the Soviet people's demise by plundering nationalized resources like oil, natural gas, and precious metals. Meanwhile, capitalist oligarchs such as, Khodorkovsky with Yukos Oil, Abramovich with Sibneft, and Potanin with Norilsk Nickel stole entire industries for pennies in rigged auctions. Workers who had been protected by socialist labor guarantees abruptly found themselves thrown into the chaos of capitalism, where Soviet laws were guaranteeing the right to free housing, healthcare, and employment were obliterated overnight. Without these safeguards, wages plummeted to starvation levels, workplaces became Dickensian sweatshops, and millions of workers went unpaid for up to 18 months. A deliberate tactic to break collective worker resistance and destroy class consciousness.
The profit motive that replaced socialist planning fueled this explosion in human suffering in post-Soviet states. Between 1991 and 2001, over 500,000 women and children from former Soviet states were sold into sexual slavery abroad, as documented by UN investigators. Desperate families abandoned children at over 4,000 state orphanages, where conditions quickly came to mirror wartime crises. Orphan rates surged by 300%, leaving 1.5 million children to fend for themselves on streets where cheap heroin from other countries flooded the markets and industrial solvents stolen from factories becoming the last comforts of the abandoned. In state homes, basic hygiene products were rationed like currency, and malnutrition became endemic, a direct result of IMF "structural adjustments" that slashed social spending. By the late 1990s, morgues in Moscow and Kyiv filled with teenagers who had overdosed on krokodil (desomorphine)-a flesh-rotting injectable drug brewed from codeine and gasoline-while others drank themselves to death with counterfeit vodka laced with antifreeze. This was not the "freedom" Capitalism projected to the world it provided, but instead a collective punishment and live experiment in stripping solidarity from societies that had dared to defy elite oppressors.
The Soviet Union was sending $150 billion in aid to other countries and even participating in full military interventions up to the last year of being unified. We must ask ourselves how organic the collapse truly was, and who benefited from it. Let’s break down which countries were being assisted within the last couple of years of being unified. Approximately 150 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) across over 45 countries were receiving aid; Afghanistan (50 billion dollars, 1979–1989), Cuba (4 to 6 billion dollars annually in subsidies), and Angola (2 billion dollars in military aid to counter U.S.-backed forces). The USSR stationed 115,000 troops in Afghanistan at peak deployment, armed Ethiopia’s Derg regime during the Ogaden War, and supplied Syria and Iraq with advanced weaponry during the Iran-Iraq War. In Latin America, it channeled 1 billion dollars to Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and briefly supported Grenada’s leftist government before the 1983 U.S. invasion. Soviet aid extended to Vietnam (post-war reconstruction) and India (industrial projects), as well as to African allies such as Mozambique and South Yemen who received arms and advisors. In 1991, this network of aid suddenly collapsed and Russia terminated subsidies, causing crises in Cuba, and triggering the fall of allied regimes like Ethiopia’s (Soviet Ministry of Finance archives, 1992; CIA Cold War reports, 1998).
In the last few years of the Soviet Union, deliberate dismantling took place from traitorous elements within its own leadership. Treachery from no other than Mikhail Gorbachev and his clique in (1985-1991). As Gorbachev himself admitted to the New York Times in 2017: "I was working toward the destruction of communism... I had a clear plan." His policies of perestroika and glasnost, initially framed as reforms, became Trojan horses for Capitalist restoration. The 1987 "Law on State Enterprises" marked the decisive turn, introducing profit motives and private market principles by decentralizing the socialist industry; effectively legalizing exploitation. Declassified CIA memos have shown Western intelligence celebrating that "Gorbachev's team includes men like Yakovlev who want to destroy socialism." By 1990, Gorbachev had abolished Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution; the guarantee of Communist Party leadership surrendering the country to counterrevolutionary forces. The final blow came in December 1991 when Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Ukrainian leader Kravchuk illegally dissolved the USSR with the Belovezh Accords - an act Soviet jurists unanimously declared unconstitutional. This was not reform, but treason: the conscious dismantling of the unified states' power by a bureaucratic elite seduced by promises of luxury for thyself with no regard to the millions who would have to pay for it.
The consequences for Soviet workers were catastrophic. At Magnitogorsk Steel Works, once the pride of Soviet industry where workers enjoyed free childcare, subsidized meals, and democratic control, workers experienced a 70% drop in safety inspections as new owners prioritized profit over lives. Wages went unpaid for 18 months at 60% of privatized plants, while worker suicides spiked 600% in industrial towns like Norilsk. A 1995 miners' strike report from Donbas contained this testimony: "They sent us into shafts with no oxygen sensors. When Vadim died in the collapse, the new owner said 'The dead don't collect salaries.'" The systematic looting turned Soviet infrastructure achievements into death traps as 40% of Russia's water pipes bursted by the year 2000, causing cholera outbreaks in 12 cities, while Ukraine's power grid failures left elderly citizens burning furniture for heat, resulting in 8,000 freezing deaths in 1994 alone.
Education suffered equally devastating setbacks as the Soviet Union dissipated. The USSR's 99% literacy rate and world-leading STEM programs that produced Sputnik and 40% of global mathematicians in the 1970s now were forced into a system where rural schools were using burned books for heat during -30°C winters. Teacher salaries that equaled $200/month in 1985 became worth just $7 by 1995 after hyperinflation. OECD tests revealed only one in three Russian teens could solve basic algebra problems by the year 2000 which is a drastic decline for the nation that had pioneered space exploration.
To the ex Soviet Union citizens horror, there was no social safety net that could have prepared them for the collapse to bring a $500 million human trafficking industry. The Soviet system had kept 95% of orphans with extended families (1989 data), but capitalism turned children into commodities, where 19,000 Russian children were sold to U.S. families before Russia's 2013 ban for up to $70,000 per child, with 21 documented murders of adoptees. Trafficking rings used the same routes for mail-order brides; Human Rights Watch documented cases like Natasha, 19, who reported in 2001: "I was sold to a German man who locked me in the basement with six other girls."
The Soviet collapse represents history's greatest wealth transfer with over $12 trillion in state assets stolen (World Bank estimate) and an unprecedented social catastrophe. Life expectancy dropped 10 years for Russian men, while 25 million were plunged into extreme poverty. The Soviet Union was the first of its kind and had the basic problems many other nations have experienced, but its collapse proved one fundamental truth: Communism defends all workers along with their humanity, while Capitalism preys and profits off them. Their suffering stands as eternal condemnation of Capitalism and proof that Communism, for all its challenges, represents humanity's most ambitious attempt to build a just world. As Georgi Zhukov stated on the liberation of Berlin: “We liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its GDP was estimated at $2.7 trillion, while the U.S. reached $6 trillion. Yet just a decade earlier, in 1980, the USSR had led the world with a GDP of $2.9 trillion, surpassing America's $2.85 trillion. While we cannot know precisely what the Soviet Union's GDP would be today, even a conservative estimate accounting solely for inflation (with no additional growth) would place it at $11 trillion in 2025 dollars-a staggering figure that underscores the scale of the economic sabotage wrought by its dissolution.
The trajectory of socialist China—which rose from $191 billion in 1980 to $40 trillion
today (PPP-adjusted)—proves that planned economies can not only compete with but surpass capitalist rivals. Yet after the USSR briefly overtook the U.S. in 1980, Gorbachev was elevated to power in 1985, systematically dismantling the very system that had made the Soviet Union an economic powerhouse. The timing is no coincidence.
Western powers and capitalist elites profited endlessly from the USSR's collapse-plundering its resources, exploiting its orphaned allies, and erasing a model that proved socialism could outproduce capitalism. While we can't calculate the exact wealth stolen from the Soviet people, one truth is undeniable: their defeat was not economic, but political-a betrayal from within, engineered by those who feared their example.