Type into Google “dissolution of the” and there are two choices: monasteries and Soviet Union.
I suppose the recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev has prompted interest in the latter; both are inflexion points in history. I hope that’s the right expression, I certainly do not mean sea changes which are imperceptible. Henry VIII took just five years to dissolve the monasteries (1536 – 1541) and here a better word would be “destroy”. It was a remarkable achievement – a testament to the Tudor Civil Service spurred on by incentives (greed) to participate in the redistribution of monastic lands and riches. Power shifted from the Church to a network of oligarchs, some of whom retain their lands in the present day.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was slightly quicker (1988 – 1991). The main driver here was a groundswell of opposition to Communist Party rule but in its wake followed a flock of ambitious entrepreneurs seeing the opportunities on offer.
Two cataclysmic events in response to two institutions abusing their power. It is debatable whether such drastic upheavals were the best solution or whether there could have been reform. It is also worth reflecting on the re-emergence of the Catholic and Anglican Churches as a powerful force and to muse on the future for the Communist Party in the years ahead. History has much to teach me. Message understood? Not really.
Nice Tudor and Russian analysis.
Did the abbeys have much power to abuse, and if so did they abuse it? Had Rome ruled as Henry VIII wished on the validity of his first marriage, the abbeys might have continued as they did in France or Italy. The reformation of monastic orders occurred periodically over the centuries: the Trappists, a hundred and some years after Henry VIII, added to the rigor of Cistercian practice, as the Cistercians had aimed to return to the earlier rigor of Benedictine practice in the Twelfth Century.
The Soviet Union had attempted reform from within, which is always tricky. It is safer to rule as Louis XIV than as Louis XVI, safer to rule as Nicholas I than as Nicholas II.