Collapse Of The Soviet Union Quotes

Karl Marx got a bum rap. All he was trying to do was figure out how to take care of a whole lot of people. Of course, socialism is just “evil” now. It’s completely discredited, supposedly, by the collapse of the Soviet Union. I can’t help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to communist China now, which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are. You talk about the collapse of communism or the Soviet Union. My goodness, this country collapsed in 1929. I mean it crashed, big time, and capitalism looked like a very poor idea.

He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you." "Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old.

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or, if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative. So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

An interlocking set of new enemies was emerging: globalization, foreigners, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, high taxes, and the incompetent politicians who could not cope with these challenges. A widening public disaffection for the political Establishment opened the way for an “antipolitics” that the extreme Right could satisfy better than the far Left after 1989. After the Marxist Left lost credibility as a plausible protest vehicle when the Soviet Union collapsed, the radical Right had no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry “losers” of the new postindustrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe.

Something wasn’t right though. That golden rule of positive psychology, hedonic adaptation, states that no matter what tragedy or good fortune befalls us, we adapt. We return to our “set point” or close enough anyway. It’s been fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why hasn’t Luba adapted?

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources. On reflection, it's no surprise that declines of societies tend to follow swiftly on their peaks.

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

A state that could not ensure its main function, a stable currency, was bound to fall apart.

Those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those who do regret it have no brain.

History has never been a morality play about the inevitable victory of freedom and democracy. Instead, the world remains what it always was: an arena of struggle between idealism and power, good governance and corruption, the surge of freedom and the need to curb it in times of crisis and emergency.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

Gorbachev said he would refuse to take the vote for Ukraine’s independence as the right to secede. Otherwise, he warned, a conflict between Ukraine and Russia could arise that would be worse than Yugoslavia. Yeltsin had “forces” in his camp who wanted to claim Crimea and Donbass for Russia.

In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. … On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events [Iran's 1979 revolution and ouster of US presence and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan]. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, Jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. On down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahabbis. History coming to an end? Hardly. As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.

The British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite wrote: “Perfectly sensible Russians froth at the mouth if it is suggested that the Ukraine (from which they all trace their history) might go off on its own.” Russian-Ukrainian relations “are as combustible as those in Northern Ireland: but the consequences of an explosion would be far more serious.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed old grievances, which culminated in Chechnya’s declaration of independence and the disastrous war from 1994 to 1996. In Putin’s mind, this amounted to the dismemberment of Russia itself, aided and abetted by nefarious foreign influences. Apparently, he meant the victors of the Cold War, principally the United States.29

The licenses and quotas on the export of oil, gas, and other raw materials—a hugely profitable business for Soviet government officials and select enterprises—would now be sold at auction.

We . . . acknowledge that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases to exist. The agreement on a Commonwealth of Independent States, Minsk, 8 December 1991

The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people's minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don't know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq―it was a superpower with artillery we'd never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to '88]―and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers' corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image―a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain―and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that's what all of them were saying―and people here really believed it.

I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened.

Another article claimed that the emergence of a powerful, flourishing Ukraine next door would force Russia to bury its imperial dreams, in order to stay in Europe. Otherwise, it would have to look for its place in Asia.

instead of billions of investments into the post-Soviet space and more jobs for Americans, as President Bush had proposed in his Russia package of 1992, hundreds of billions went into China, and many American workers lost their jobs

Gorbachev proposed a new world order based not on ideology, but on the “all-human interests” of cooperation and integration. This was a rejection of the Cold War order based on antagonism between the USSR and the USA and their respective allies.

When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism – there was no alternative – and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare. There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communism states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union. As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West – Europe and the United States above all – missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.

For the Russians, Ukraine was like Scotland to the English, only closer. From the Russian perspective, Ukraine was filing for divorce without a settlement. This Russian mindset was bound to clash with Ukrainian nationalism and become a source of great tension and trouble for decades to come.

Russia had already ceded Soviet ports and bases on the Baltic Sea to the Balts; Ukrainian secession would mean that the Russian state would lose nineteen out of twenty-two ports on the Black Sea. The feeling that the Russian-Ukrainian accord was unfair would become the main source of conflict for years to come.

The naval base of Sevastopol was widely considered by Russians to be the city of Russian glory since the Crimean War of 1854–55. It happened to be inside the Ukrainian SSR, after Crimea was transferred to the republic under Nikita Khrushchev. The city’s population, however, passionately believed in their Russian identity.

Many threads in the analysis of the Soviet collapse overlapped and created a widespread feeling of doom—with the result that ultimately the event became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet for a historian, this collapse presents a puzzle that does not quite click together. This puzzle became the main subject of this book. Gorbachev lies at the center of this puzzle.

I belong to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dicatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union. I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it. I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se—especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded only upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims.

The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow. Yeltsin berated President Clinton, insisting that an intervention was forbidden by international law, only to be ignored. Russia resented the fact that the United States and its expanding NATO alliance were acting as if they could impose their will on the new world order without regard to Russia’s interests. Even worse, the conflict in Kosovo had striking parallels to the one in Chechnya, and even Russians not prone to paranoia could imagine a NATO campaign on behalf of Chechnya’s independence movement.

The logic of economic reform, the struggle for Soviet assets, the realities of power and state-building pushed the Yeltsin government to get rid of Gorbachev. Other factors, above all economic interdependence and the fear of an uncontrollable break-up, and the need for recognition and legitimacy from the United States and Western Europe, forced Yeltsin to keep the Union afloat.

The countries of Eastern Europe, Shakhnazarov said, had already begun to make approaches to NATO. Ukraine might do the same. “If this happens,” he continued, then we “would get [NATO] on our borders.” And what about Crimea? Would this peninsula, so integral to Russian national identity, become foreign territory?4 Burbulis replied that all this could be resolved by skillful diplomacy.

Popov, the head of Moscow’s City Council, took the floor. He did not believe that Russian Solidarity was a good option: 1991 would be the year of “catastrophe equal to a war or the Great Depression.” Soviet national income would fall by 10 or 20 percent, he said. Angry and unemployed masses would yearn for an authoritarian leader, he claimed: in America they had found Roosevelt, in Germany—Hitler.

There was no political will or imagination among Western leaders to seize the unprecedented and historic opportunity to consolidate democracy in Russia. The widespread view was that the post-Soviet space was too huge and unpredictable for integration within the Western orbit. It was more realistic and pragmatic to pick the low-hanging fruits of the Cold War victory, above all in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

Yeltsin had spent years battling with lack of food supplies in his Sverdlovsk region. His greatest achievement had been to establish a system of poultry farms near Sverdlovsk that supplemented the meagre diet of workers in the industrial plants and factories. Randalls supermarket amazed him. This was an average place where the poorest American could buy what even the top Soviet nomenklatura could not back home.

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.

Even the sudden collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union provide little cause for long-term optimism about the economic system of the United States. This is because, as will be explained later, all the essentials of socialism live on in the ecology movement, and are enjoying growing influence in the United States even while socialism in the form of Marxism is in decline in most of the world.

Following his fall from power, Mikhail Gorbachev set up a charitable foundation and think tank based in Moscow and struggled to remain influential in Russian politics. In 1996, he ran for president of the Russian Federation but won less than 1 percent of ballots counted. He would later insist that it was the explosion of Reactor Number Four—and not his own bungled reforms—that proved the catalyst in the destruction of the Union he had so desperately wished to preserve. In April 2006, he wrote: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.

Tight control over the alchemy of official “Staliniana” has created false and doubly majestic images of Stalin and his accomplishments.39 These images outlive the man himself and have an appeal even in contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the stresses of the transitional period, corruption, poverty, and glaring social inequality all feed the longing for a social utopia. A significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past. Popular images of the greatness of the Stalinist empire—of equality and the fight against corruption, of the joy and purity of this distant life undone by “enemies”—are exploited by unscrupulous commentators and politicians. How great is the danger that a blend of historical ignorance, bitterness, and social discontent will provide fertile ground for pro-Stalinist lies and distortions to take root?

In August, Baltic nationalists decided to mobilize a massive protest on the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact. Acting on the initiative of Estonia’s Edgar Savisaar, on 23 August they staged a gigantic human chain that stretched all the way from Tallinn to Vilnius, some 600 kilometers. The media called it the “Baltic Way.” The popular mood among the Balts was to break away from the Soviet Union as soon as possible.

On 19–20 June, the Chancellor’s office invited the deputy head of the Soviet government, Stepan Sitaryan, to come to Berlin to negotiate the financial aspects of a future German settlement. On 25 June, the West German government signed a formal agreement on financial assistance to Soviet troops. Soviet officers would exchange their savings for Deutschmarks, one to one; Soviet forces in the GDR after 1 July would be largely funded from the West German budget.

The United States was the first country that Yeltsin had ever visited outside the Soviet Union on his own rather than as part of an official Soviet delegation. He was feted and dined by wealthy Americans, flown by private jets, and stayed in the houses of American millionaires. Although he expected the lifestyle of the super-rich to be a never-ending feast, the real shock for him was his impromptu visit to Randalls discount supermarket, on the way to Houston Airport.

Vladimir Lukin in Yeltsin’s entourage strongly believed that the borders of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan “were the products of the Bolsheviks’ cynical manipulation of nationalism in order to construct their totalitarian empire.” Internationally monitored referendums, Lukin argued, should be called to allow these areas to decide whether they wanted to become part of a new democratic Russia or stay as they were. The territories in question were Crimea and the Donbass region.

After returning from his American trip, while speaking to journalists and his MDG colleagues, Yeltsin regaled them with details of his supermarket visit. He waxed lyrical about the “madness of colors, boxes, packs, sausages, cheeses,” and rhapsodized that the average American family spent one-tenth or less of their salaries on food, while a Soviet family spent over half of their salaries on food, and more. Yeltsin decided that his mission now was to bring the “American dream” to the Russian people.

My response to the end of Soviet tyranny was similar to my reaction to the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. In all cases, it is a victory for the human spirit. It should have been particularly welcome to socialists, since a great enemy of socialism had at last collapsed. Like you, I was intrigued to see how people—including people who had considered themselves anti-Stalinist and anti-Leninist—were demoralized by the collapse of the tyranny. What it reveals is that they were more deeply committed to Leninism than they believed.

As president, I fought for the unity of the country until the very end. I fought by political means – it is important to emphasize this – and I tried to win over Soviet citizens and my colleagues, the leaders of the Union republics. Even today, I believe that the integrity of the country could have been preserved and that a new Union was in everyone's interest. But the coup weakened my position, and the leadership of Russia, the largest republic of the USSR, under Boris Yeltsin decided to dissolve the Soviet Union instead. The country fell apart, the state collapsed.

One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive. “Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day. “Wait to do it here!” Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. “Next time I’ll remember!” she would say. Thankfully, she never actually did this. The big effort to collect waste peaked in January, so it could be ready for growing season. Our bathrooms in North Korea were usually far away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbors didn’t steal from you at night. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class. So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop—and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.

No one will ever know the exact number of people executed and starved to death in the Soviet Union between the time of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of Communism. Soviet archives at this point do not reveal the total numbers. Unofficial estimates have ranged from twenty million to as high as eighty million. The wide range is explained in part by the fact that some estimates do not include certain groups of people who were murdered or those who died from hard labor, exhaustion, starvation, or disease (such persons were considered by the Soviets to have died of natural causes).

Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A

executives at America’s largest energy companies began late in 1995 to imagine the future by studying historical maps. Across Afghanistan travelers along the Silk Road had created fortunes for centuries by moving spice, jewels, and textiles to new markets. The profitable game now—created by the Soviet Union’s collapse—was oil and natural gas. The key trade routes were the same as they had been for centuries. Many led through Afghanistan. Robin Raphel and others at the State Department and the White House believed that for American oil companies, too, the Taliban could be an important part of a new Afghan solution.

Soviet Jews would be released because the Soviet empire was in tatters. That was certainly my view, one that I had developed over the previous decade through telling conversations. In 1979, at the first Jonathan Institute conference in Jerusalem, I had spoken with the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. “Benjamin,” he had said, “please understand, the Soviet regime is desperate. Everything is rotten inside. Nothing works. It’s one big rotten core held together by the façade of invincibility provided by nuclear ICBMs parading in Red Square.” He predicted that within a decade the Soviet Union as we knew it would collapse. He was right on the

By mid-November, all US diplomatic and intelligence agencies concurred that the referendum of 1 December would confirm Ukraine’s independence. For Bush and Scowcroft, however, the vote posed a problem. Ukraine’s voters “almost certainly would vote for sovereignty,” recalled Scowcroft, “but not necessarily independent [sic] from the Soviet Union . . . What became clear to me was that Yeltsin was maneuvering so that the Ukraine would be the proximate cause of the break-up of the Soviet Union.” Should the United States therefore announce its recognition of Ukraine straightaway and thus set the final break-up of the USSR in motion? Dick Cheney and his deputies in the Pentagon proposed just that.

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

I believed—most Americans believed—that the spread of communism would mean loss of freedom and torture and death, and perhaps even nuclear war. We never imagined the communist world would just collapse as it did in the Soviet Union years later. We thought the only way to preserve our lifestyle was to fight theirs. And we couldn’t, truthfully, imagine that America might be wrong. We didn’t like to imagine that what we were doing as a country could be imperialist or illegal or just plain immoral any more than we liked to imagine an America that could be defeated by a small country of small people we thought of as less intelligent and less compassionate and less worthy than we were. So we just didn’t imagine it. Even

Pride in the heroes of Sevastopol, the ‘city of Russian glory’, remains an important source of national identity, although today it is situated in a foreign land – a result of the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 and the declaration of Ukrainian independence on the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the words of one Russian nationalist poet: On the ruins of our superpower There is a major paradox of history: Sevastopol – the city of Russian glory – Is … outside Russian territory.31 The loss of the Crimea has been a severe blow to the Russians, already suffering a loss of national pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Nationalists have actively campaigned for the Crimea to return to Russia, not least nationalists in Sevastopol itself, which remains an ethnic Russian town.

History can familiarize, and it can warn. In the late nineteenth century, just as in the late twentieth century, the expansion of global trade generated expectations of progress. In the early twentieth century, as in the early twenty-first, these hopes were challenged by new visions of mass politics in which a leader or a party claimed to directly represent the will of the people. European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The communist Soviet Union, established in 1922, extended its model into Europe in the 1940s. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

Most observers had overlooked the radical change in the relationship between the USSR and the world that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the Soviet economy, formally still closed, had in fact become deeply integrated into the system of international trade and dependent on world markets (see table 4-19). This change, as a rule, was noticed only by researchers concerned with grain and oil markets. The majority of analysts studying the socialist system considered its foundation to be solid.99 Some publications spoke of risk factors that could undermine the stability of the Soviet regime. But they were exceptions, and their influence on the future image of the USSR was limited.100 In 1985 almost no one imagined that six years later there would be no Soviet Union, no ruling Communist Party, no Soviet economic system.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.

A nuclear dispute between post-Soviet republics was an outlandish idea for anyone living in the Soviet Union. A few days earlier, however, a troubling incident had occurred. Vice-President Rutskoy had used the nuclear argument in his negotiations with Ukrainian government officials. He was acting as an envoy of Gazprom, to bargain on the commercial price of natural gas in pipelines that ran from Siberia to Western Europe across Ukraine. The talks quickly touched on other issues, including the future of Crimea, and grew heated. Rutskoy, no diplomat, said that Ukraine should not behave so stubbornly “with a nuclear power.” The Ukrainian negotiators responded that their republic also had nuclear weapons and would defend its borders by all means available. Newspapers wrote about the threat of “a Russian nuclear strike against Ukraine.” Yeltsin was forced to provide explanations.

Beyond the intermingling of their finances and interests, the Western rich and the oligarchic rich share an ideological affinity that is worth worrying about too: they are unshakeable in their belief that they are entitled to their wealth, and have every moral right to resist attempts to reduce it. It never occurs to them that they are lucky; that if they are Western speculators, they are lucky to have lived during a time when the negligent governments of America and Britain failed to regulate finance and allowed them to take incredible risks at no personal cost; that if they are post-communist oligarchs, they were lucky to be in place when the Soviet Union collapsed, and to have the connections and muscle to take control of the old empire’s raw materials. To outsiders their luck seems self-evident. Yet nowhere in the recorded utterances of the plutocracy does one find a glimmer of an understanding that time and chance played a part in their good fortune.

For first-time Soviet travelers to the West a visit to a supermarket produced the biggest effect. The contrast between half-empty, gloomy Soviet food stores and glittering Western palaces with an abundant selection of food was mind-boggling. Not a single Soviet visitor was prepared for the sight of pyramids of oranges, pineapples, tomatoes, bananas; endless varieties of fresh fish and meat, in lieu of a butcher cutting chunks from bluish hulks from a freezer; efficient cashiers with a smiling attitude, instead of rude saleswomen doling out greasy cans and jars to a long line of desperately hungry customers. And then actually to be allowed to touch, to smell, to savor! A severe aftershock awaited Soviet visitors upon their subsequent return to the Soviet Union, and to scenes of misery. This experience changed Soviet travelers forever. Western standards, unimaginable before, immediately became the new norm. Soviet realities, part of everyday habit, suddenly became “abnormal” and therefore revolting, unbearable.

The Marxist prediction that capitalism would ultimately collapse and be replaced by socialism (Khrushchev’s tactless ‘We will bury you!’) had been a comfort to Soviet Communists as they struggled against Russia’s historical ‘backwardness’ to make a modern, industrialised, urbanised society. They made it, more or less, by the beginning of the 1980s. Soviet power and status was recognised throughout the world. ‘Soviet man’ became a recognisable animal, with close relatives in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, more problematic relatives in China and North Korea, and admirers in the Third World. Then, in one of the most spectacular unpredicted ‘accidents’ of modern history, it was Soviet ‘socialism’ that collapsed, giving way to what the Russians called the ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s. An array of fifteen new successor states, including the Russian Federation, emerged blinking into the light of freedom – all, including the Russians, loudly complaining that in the old days of the Soviet Union they had been victims of exploitation.

The communists didn’t release their grip until the late 1980s. Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceaus¸escu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timis¸oara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceaus¸escu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilised 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. To the cheering of the seemingly enthusiastic crowd, Ceauşescu mounted the balcony overlooking the square, as he had done scores of times in previous decades. Flanked by his wife, Elena, leading party officials and a bevy of bodyguards, Ceaus¸escu began delivering one of his trademark dreary speeches. For eight minutes he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, looking very pleased with himself as the crowd clapped mechanically. And then something went wrong. You can see it for yourself on YouTube. Just search for ‘Ceauşescu’s last speech’, and watch history in action.20 The YouTube clip shows Ceaus¸escu starting another long sentence, saying, ‘I want to thank the initiators and organisers of this great event in Bucharest, considering it as a—’, and then he falls silent, his eyes open wide, and he freezes in disbelief. He never finished the sentence. You can see in that split second how an entire world collapses. Somebody in the audience booed. People

The success of authoritarian reforms in China, they argue, was a unique case and could not be repeated under Soviet conditions.55 China, although in many ways a communist clone of the USSR, had fundamentally different starting conditions for reforms. Gorbachev could not release the energy of the peasantry in the way Deng did: Soviet agriculture, no more than 20 percent of the total workforce, had long been a state-subsidized business. China could leave its old industries, 15 percent of the total economy, alone, while creating a new market industrial sector. The Soviet economy was industrialized to an absurd extent, and its mono-industrial cities had no chance of surviving under market conditions. China’s economy tapped into peasants’ savings and foreign investments. The Soviet budget was overloaded by a safety net of 100 billion rubles paid as pensions and social benefits to Soviet citizens, as well as subsidies to external clients and internal republics. Moscow was losing billions of rubles because of oil prices and ill-fated economic decentralization.

The Germans were eventually beaten only when the liberal countries allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the conflict and paid a much higher price: 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, compared to half a million Britons and half a million Americans. Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war. The Soviet Union entered the war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers, and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed, they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently told the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves. You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.

While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.

Nonetheless, it is not (as most conservatives believe) true that the Soviet Union collapsed solely because it provided such awful government to its subjects.​ No.​ It wasn’t just that the Russians were governed incompetently and reprehensibly.​ It was also that they had a clear alternative which was readily available and apparently superior.​ I.e.: American democracy.

When Russia splintered a century ago, the Muslim regions and Siberia were the first to break away. The fall of the Soviet Union produced another breakup, with Ukraine, the Baltic states and the central Asian republics gaining independence. The invasion of Ukraine could be the trigger for a greater collapse: the final implosion of the Russian empire.

There were many American, not to mention European or Japanese, exhibitions sent to the Soviet Union.

By the 1980s, Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the idea of a “single culture of the Soviet people, socialist in content, diverse in its national forms, internationalist in spirit” faltered against the fact that nationalism had acquired meaningful content to Soviet citizens in a way that socialist internationalism had not.49 For seventy years, the carrot of Soviet-style “internationalism” and the stick of Soviet repression had squelched demands for independence while promoting nationalism in other ways. This combination had prevented the breakup of the multinational empire, which otherwise would probably have collapsed after World War I, along with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. With repression now eased, “openness” and “restructuring” were about to launch the Soviet Union, too, into a new world of identity politics. Moscow found itself faced with the choice between “nativized” elites, who were corrupt but loyal to Soviet “internationalism,” and alternative leaders in the republics, who were nationalists and not loyal to the Soviet Union.

Everyone hates the Bulgarians. The UN pays countries cash to send soldiers on peacekeeping missions. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Bulgaria lost its subsidies and was broke. The Bulgarian government wanted money but didn’t want to send their best-trained troops. So, the story goes, they offered inmates in the prisons and psychiatric wards a deal: put on a uniform and go to Cambodia for six months, you’re free on return. All you have to do is stand guard and give away food, they said, the UN is not a real military. A battalion of criminal lunatics arrives in a lawless land. They get drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women, and crash their UN Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency.

What we do know is that since 1945, and especially since the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the unchecked twin forces of unconstrained money-power and unconstrained rationalistic intellectualism have greatly accelerated the unravelling of Western civilisation to an extent that might have surprised even the man who told us that ‘optimism is cowardice’.[60]

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mobutu’s value to the West collapsed with it. A genocide in neighboring Rwanda proved to be the catalyst for his final downfall.

-Whatever the world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given historical lessons and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways; the diplomatic and war strategy. After retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Bin Laden since that and the Iraq war till present, the USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is the destiny that may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.

Breaking Tweet Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given, a historical lesson and silent defeat, to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Usama Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.

Whatever the world would say, however, as a fact, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given a historical lesson and a silent defeat to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Usama Bin Laden. Since then and the Iraq War until the present, the USA has lost its incredibility in the eyes of the world and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, seems to restore and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, failure is its destiny and may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, put the Soviet Union at risk of collapsing altogether. In this environment, the Soviet tendency to merge espionage and sabotage into a single mission came to the fore, strengthening practices Soviet intelligence and state security services had implemented from the beginning of the Soviet era. Soviet intelligence activities were divided into two lines: intelligence and diversion. Initially, the intelligence directorate, led during World War II by Pavel Fitin, was responsible for collecting intelligence about Germany and its allies. The diversionary directorate, led by Pavel Sudoplatov, dispatched "intelligence sabotage" teams behind German lines to disrupt Germany's supply lines, command and control, and rear areas and to assassinate German officers. According to Fitin, the intelligence directorate supplied intelligence for the diversionary directorate, and officers were regularly exchanged between the two. This crossover between intelligence and sabotage operations is a continuing characteristic of Russian intelligence services today.

had been held back by the belief that looking inwards would be the solution to its development puzzle. However, data and global experiences were increasingly refuting this school of thought. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China based on outward-oriented policies shifted the dialogue towards economic liberalization and the benefits of globalization. China

Putin was not a fan of the Soviet Union,” Kahl said, “but he still saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the biggest crime of the 20th century and believed that the Russians had been serially stabbed in the back since then.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

THE SOVIET UNION was able to generate rapid growth even under extractive institutions because the Bolsheviks built a powerful centralized state and used it to allocate resources toward industry. But as in all instances of growth under extractive institutions, this experience did not feature technological change and was not sustained. Growth first slowed down and then totally collapsed. Though ephemeral, this type of growth still illustrates how extractive institutions can stimulate economic activity. Throughout

Nationalist Arab countries concluded that the United States would continue to back Israel, while the Soviet Union did not. So immediately after the Suez War, Syria signed a military agreement with the Soviet Union. The Soviets began shipping planes and tanks to Syria. Their alliance survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and continues with Russia today.

Yet the interests of the international statesman may not always align with the ‘national interest’, particularly if the statesman is now also a member of some international organization that provides him with a whole bunch of new incentives.21 At that point, the statesman’s role is in danger of becoming disturbingly ambiguous. Does the new international club provide a convenient scapegoat for the delivery of unpopular measures at home, as happened with the imposition of austerity measures in Southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis that began in 2010? Does the homogeneity of view associated with club membership – for example, adherence to the Washington Consensus or acceptance of inflation-targeting conventions – undermine otherwise legitimate protests at home? Does the new club limit the powers of domestic government through the growth of, for example, a supranational legal authority? And what happens if the views of the international statesman – and the new club he has now joined – are rejected by the nation he is supposed to represent? None of these issues is new. The scale of the problem is, however, bigger than ever before. Even as markets – in trade, capital and labour – have become ever more globalized, the institutions able to govern those markets have become ever more fragmented. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, there were 51 member nations. In 2011, the year in which South Sudan joined, there were 193. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a binary choice between what might loosely be described as US-style free-market capitalism and Moscow-inspired communism.

Deng’s judgment about the importance of strong economic growth was later validated by a series of studies of the collapse of the USSR conducted by party scholars in the 1990s. These scholars concluded that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) fell for four main reasons: •  The economy did not grow fast enough, leading to frustration and resentment, and this failure resulted from insufficient use of market mechanisms. •  The CPSU’s propaganda and information systems were too closed and ideologically rigid, preventing officials from getting accurate and timely knowledge about conditions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. •  Decision-making was far too centralized, and hence far too slow. •  Once reforms started under Gorbachev, they undermined the core principle of the party’s absolute monopoly on political power.14

Neo-conservatism in all its pomp conceived - in the Project for a New American Century - that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world could be remade in the American image, that the previous bipolar world could be replaced by a unipolar one in which the U.S. was the dominant arbiter of global and regional affairs.

It amazes me still to this day how quickly the empire fell to pieces. One day the people are kissing the ground upon which the Tsar’s shadow has fallen, the next they are hacking apart his body. Nikolai merely put down his scepter and walked away, and literally overnight a three-hundred-year old dynasty evaporated — poof, gone! — with no one lifting a finger to save it. Ironic that the Soviet Union collapsed just as easily, which proves it was no better, that the cure, kommunizm, was in fact far worse than the disease itself. Now, I can only hope, those days are over, and just maybe that’s true. After all, it took nearly one hundred years for the insanity to fade from France after their revolution.

In 1992 Cuba was busy building the “Juragua Nuclear Power Plant” on its southern coast, near Cienfuegos, the capital of Cienfuegos Province. All was going well, however construction had to be suspended following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The United States had been opposed to the project and discouraged other countries from assisting Cuba in completing this monumental project. Eight years later, when the Russian economy improved some, Vladimir Putin offered to finish one of the reactors. With estimates regarding the cost to finish this reactor ranging from $300 million to $750 million, Putin offered Cuba a grant of $800 million over a period of 10 years. Because of Cuba’s heavy national debt, Castro stated that Cuba was no longer interested in finishing the plant and would be seeking other energy alternatives. In 2004, a turbine was removed from the stalled project, to be used as a replacement for a damaged turbine at the “Guiteras thermoelectric plant,” thus effectively ending the “Juragua Electic Project.

Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We’ve established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.

But in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. With the collapse, the West won the Cold War and lost its major scientific competitor. The Western science enterprise, without realizing it, suddenly lost the rationale Vannevar Bush had used to get government funding.

There is another powerful factor which works against the chance of any kind of peaceful reconstruction and which is equally negative for all levels of society: this is the extreme isolation in which the regime has placed both society and itself. This isolation has not only separated the regime from society, and all sectors of society from each other, but also put the country in extreme isolation from the rest of the world. This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it. Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. . . American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. . . At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. . .It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. . . Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

The Soviet response was silence, followed by bellicose denial, followed by efforts to derail the international investigation. It was eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Russia acknowledged the truth.

And when the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, Dick wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world. He and I had always had a cordial

the meantime, he held the terrorists back from attacking the United States itself, there would be a proper time to strike, and Gregory told them it would be sometime in the next ten years, they needed to be patient. The Soviet Union collapsing at the end of the 1980’s was a complete surprise to Gregory, he had honestly thought they were as strong as they said they were, but apparently they weren’t, and he thought that maybe his age was causing his mental faculties to be impaired, which was why he thought he missed the signs. Except for the United States, the rest of the Western powers were all on the decline too, thanks to Gregory’s manipulating of their economies and their governments.

clearly remembers the Soviet Union collapsing, so when I was a kid, he kept saying that the Affordable Health Care Act, and the way the NSA, DHS, EPA, and TSA were acting, was inching us closer to that system of government. Now, along with the United Nations’ Agenda 21, we’re almost there. I really wish the Conservative Party and Victor Tyson could win the Presidency, because he would ask the U.N. to leave and try to get us back to being a federal republic,