Is Mikhail Gorbachev responsible for the collapse of communism?
Yes. The basic causes were economic stagnation, the rise of nationalist resistance to the ideology of communism, attempts to increase democracy, and changes in the international political environment. These factors were all interlinked and the Soviet leadership failed to devise a sequence of reforms that would enable it to sustain its rule. By the 1980s the Communist regimes were all coming close to economic stagnation, in part caused by enormous defence expenditures. The Star Wars initiative proposed by the United States president Ronald Reagan in 1983 threatened to provoke an arms race that would impose even greater burdens on people who had experienced improvements in their standard of living and wanted more.
