Anyone know about the Cold War?

3. "Normal" is relative. If by normal you mean the western market economy, then it differed a great deal. The Soviet economy was characterized by rapid industrialization. Food, produced mostly in the SSRs and ASSRs south east of the Ural mountains, was meant to sustain the industrial complex of the cities, which focused on mass production and industry. Unlike the western conception of the market economy, the socialist economy of the Soviet Union was regulated by the Politburo acting on behalf of the proletariat class. The reason the Soviet Union's economy collapsed was defined by Gorbachev as a lack of transparency and adequate structuring within the Politburo, and other elements of the state bureaucracy. As a result, and in a last ditch attempt at salvaging Soviet Socialism, in the late 1980s he called for "Glasnost" (transparency) and "Perestroika" (restructuring), which aimed to drastically reform the state bureaucracy - but this ultimately failed.

But Gorbachev's explanation is certainly a simplification. The USSR suffered widespread corruption, and was prone to famine and social dissatisfaction. The Friday Revolutions in Soviet controlled East Germany triggered a chain reaction in the Eastern Bloc (the part of Europe under Soviet influence) which revealed widespread discontent with Sovietism, discontent that couldn't necessarily be expressed under the police-state of Brezhnev or Khrushchev.

I hope this helps! I can answer some of the others if you haven't submitted this already. Lots of luck.

The Cold War, often dated from 1947 to 1991, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO among its allies, and powers in the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union along with the Warsaw Pact. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia; this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led East.

if you want details then go this link ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

1. The Soviets as a government decided what the country needed produced, how much and who would perform the work. This caused large portions of the goods to be wasted which hurt the growth of the economy. In the US the marketplace incentivised what should be produced, how much and created a profit for those who produced the output, which constantly caused the production to be adjusted to continue and increase the profit margin.

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