of civilization as a whole, if not the extinction of human life on Earth.
Then, in the course of a few years, the Soviet Union vanished, and did so in an astonishing atmosphere of calm. Only three known lives were lost in the the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August of 1991 that triggered the final fall of the Soviet system. If we add to those the total of lives lost in the last repressions of the Baltic states and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, we still arrive at a death toll comparable to that of an urban riot in the United States, vastly lower than that of (say) the Tienanmen Square repression in China in 1989.
How did this course of events, so utterly unexpected, come about? In retrospect, when we can in a manner of speaking look at the answers in the back of the book, we may argue that two factors contributed to the Soviet Union's fall. One was the broad economic trend in the industrialized world during the second half of the twentieth century. The other was that totalitarian systems proved to be, in the long term, extremely unstable.
Let us consider the economic factor first. The great totalitarian systems first began to emerge in
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