This six-hour seminar provides the lesson plans and background information that enable social studies teachers to explain why the economy of the Soviet Union collapsed. This six-lesson unit exposes the futility of central planning. Teaching simulations, included in the first five lessons, use experiences of Soviet citizens to illustrate economic concepts. The last lesson ties it all back to life in the United States. The materials not only explain why the Soviet economy collapsed, they also provide basic economic lessons that every American should know.
- Thirty teachers accepted per program
- Refundable $25 deposit (NO tuition or other fees)
- Lesson plans - including background information, chronologies of events, economic data, simulations, and testing instruments
- Nationally acclaimed instructors
EDSU Content & Topics
Weaknesses in the economy of the Soviet Union were apparent from its inception. The Stalinist growth strategy was based on a policy of forced investment from the top, but the institutions that were used to implement this growth strategy took economic power and rights away from individual households and assigned them to the elite. Economic development was based on state ownership of capital and land, centralized management, and replacement of many market institutions by administrative allocation. While these institutional arrangements assured centralized political control by a communist party elite, they led to increasing divergence between the behavior prescribed by official rules and the actual behavior of individuals, to the destruction of incentives for individual efficiency and initiative, and to a loss of credibility by the government.
National cohesion, however, is based on more than economics alone; political-legal and moral-cultural structures are also vital to national strength. Weaknesses in any one of the three intertwined components of the Soviet systems:
- the economic structures,
- the political-legal structures, and
- the moral-cultural structures;
was sustainable as long as the other structures offset those weaknesses. In the 1980s, however, the ever-mounting pressures of economic failure combined with changes in citizens' perceptions of their world and their government to topple the communist system that had controlled an empire since 1917.