The abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s was possibly the least anticipated development of the twentieth century. Almost all writers on the future of the Soviet Union foresaw something quite different than what actually came to pass. Liberals had a vague hope that the system would liberalize into Western European-style social democracy. Conservatives had an equally vague hope that nationalism, religion, or the sheer inefficiency of state socialism, might eventually undermine the system and lead to a counter-revolution.
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 Germany and Fascist Italy -- had been precipitated by their total defeat in general war. Brzezinski and Friedrich (1965, p. 375) specifically ruled out the possibility of internal upheaval. Even in prenuclear World War Two, the price of lifting the totalitarian yoke through general war was hideously great. In a nuclear age, these precedents suggested, the fall of totalitarianism might only come about in the wake of nuclear war, and be accompanied by the fall...