How did the US and USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th century to allow communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

Many factors come into play here but I would say if there is a main reason it would be the gradual injection of western ideologies into the soviet society, this, followed by the arms and space race of the cold war. Policies introduced by Gorbachev (Glasnost, Perestroika, and demokratizatsiia) brought in a shift in the political, social and economic structure of the union. With these policies, the Soviets experienced a move from a command economy to a semi-free market system. Something close to the free market practiced in the US. The ideas of political reforms such as elections in a formerly autocratic society moved the soviets one step closer to the west. ”Glasnost and Perestroika eventually helped cause the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, which had lasted from 1945-1991” (Gitomirski, n.d.). By the end of the 20th century, the soviet society was less of a communist state than it was at the beginning, and this was one of the reasons for the whimper communism went out with rather than a catastrophic bang.

As for the space and arms race during the cold war; the former culminated in a joint partnership between both countries as “American shuttles rendezvoused with Soviet space stations” (Franklin, 2019). The competition – the space race – brought some sort of familiarity between both counties that reduced the effect of the collapse the Union would have experienced. The arms race resulted in a stale mate as a result of a phenomenon called Mutual Assured Destruction.

References

Franklin, B. (2019, April). Week 6 Lesson. Retrieved April 2019, from Chamberlain University: https://chamberlain.instructure.com/courses/41723/…

Gitomirski, S. (n.d.). GLASNOST AND PERESTROIKA. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from The Cold War Museum: www.coldwar.org/articles/80s/GlasnostandPerestroik…

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