ABSTRACT
The economic crisis played a vital role in the political drama enacted towards the end of Perestroika and the socio-political instability that became a vexed problem for the post Soviet nation-states. Free-fall in the standards of living, burgeoning unemployment, galloping inflation, nosediving production, obsolete technology, depreciating ruble, dismantling of the welfare system, a bankrupt state unable to pay its employees and collect revenues, unbridled privatisation, reign of economic mafia not governed by any laws, rapid emergence of social and class differentiation thereby disturbing the societal harmony, a conflict between the existing public sector and emerging private sector and absence of any redistributive mechanism to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth contributed to a state of social, political and cultural entropy. The basis for all these was laid during the Soviet era and every foregoing element was as true for the last phase of Perestroika as for the post-Soviet era, albeit in a more severe form.
