As the title says. This is something that has always confused me, but why was it so easy to dismantle the Soviet Union? The blame is usually put in Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but the Union wasn’t governed by just a single man. The whole CPSU was responsible for the government’s actions. How was it, that these opportunists managed to get in there and just tear the country apart?
Also, how was it impossible to restore the previous order? So Yeltsin, a liberal sell out, is in power and nothing can be done to remove him and restore socialism? Why were the protests to bring back socialism not enough?
I think the means of productions just hadn’t reached the level of development required for the transition to new relations of production. Namely, there wasn’t automation that would eliminate routine alienated work and also make production decentralised. On the other hand, centralised alienated production started to get very fragmented (yes, centralised but fragmented), leading to the centralised form of property Soviet socialism was based on becoming no longer suitable for its fragmented content. So even though people protested, their economic needs unknowingly drove them to capitalism. It was a collective unconscious necessity.
It is a good example of an internal dialectical contradiction where something is two polar things at the same time.