Impact of Collapse of the Soviet Union

On both sides of the spectrum, however, these possibilities were, well into the 1980s, banished into an indefinite future (Urban, 1993, pp. xix-xx). Only one writer, the Soviet historian Andrei Amalric, asked in 1969 whether the Soviet Union could last until 1984 -- missing the mark only by a few years (Urban, 1993, p. 222). After a breath of liberalization during the Khrushchev era, the Soviet Union under Brezhnev had sunk into an era of stagnation that nevertheless seemed immensely durable. The spectacular totalitarian crimes of the Stalin era were long past, but in its quieter, bureaucratic way, the Brezhnevian Soviet Union seemed just as effective in crushing every sign of dissent and every hope for change. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl J. Friedrich, in their study Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (revised in 1965), pointed out that the only previous instances of the fall of totalitarian systems -- those of Nazi

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projects, had a somewhat similar flavor within a democratic political and social context. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Soviet propagandists trumpeted the rapid expansion of their mass-industrial economy, proclaiming that they were on the point of overtaking the United States in steel production and similar output indices. But as it happened, the mass-industrial paradigm was then already on the way toward obsolescence. The broad economic trend of the postwar era was toward subtlety and suppleness: the transister, the computer. Even in heavy industry, the move was toward quality rather than quantity, toward mills able to provide specialty steels on demand rather than mere mass quantities of a basic, low-quality product. When Western observers were finally able to get an exhaustive look at the Soviet economic infrastructure, they found it decades behind that of the West. The broad obsolescence of the Soviet economy effected not only its consumer economy, but even its military capacity. The best Soviet weapons were effective, but they tended to be far less sophisticated than their Western counterparts, and in the age of "smart" weapons, in which computers and advanced sensors were vital components, the gap was steadily growing
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