During the 20th century, several individuals and organizations made predictions that the Soviet Union would cease to exist as a sovereign state at some point in the near future.Historians point to dissolution beginning with the Polish Round Table Agreement in 1989 Although the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place between 1988 and 1991, and the USSR ceased to exist due to the departure of all 15 Union Republics as independent sovereign states, there is debate on whether any particular prediction was correct—as they give different reasons, series of events, and predicted timelines for the dissolution.Proposed reasons include political infighting, economic problems, external pressure, foreign invasion, civil war, and religious reasons.
Authors often considered to have predicted an end of the Soviet Union include Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936), Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique (1976), Indian-American economist Ravi Batra in The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism (1978), and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Additionally, American historian Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such as Problems of Communism and Survey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime." Some Americans, particularly conservatives, view the Strategic Defense Initiative of the Reagan administration as not only predicting, but causing the dissolution of the Soviet state.
Conventional wisdom discounting a collapse
U.S. analysts Predictions of the Soviet Union's impending demise were discounted by many Western academic specialists, and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology. (Review of The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union) For example, Amalrik's book "was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West" but "virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction." Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike.
In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.
The Central Intelligence Agency also over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union, and did not anticipate its rapid dissolution. Former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem."Cited on page 108 of
In a symposium launched in 1967 to review Michel Garder's French book: L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which predicted a collapse of the USSR, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garder's book as "the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism." He warns that "great revolutions are most infrequent and that successful political systems are tenacious and adaptive." In addition, the reviewer of the book, Michael Tatu, disapproved of the "apocalyptic character" of such a forecast and is almost apologetic for treating it seriously.
Predictions of dissolution or collapse Analysts, organizations and politicians who predicted that the Soviet Union would one day cease to exist included:
Ludwig von Mises The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued in his 1922 book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis that the Soviet system would eventually cease to exist. This book was written during the period of war communism in early Soviet Russia and analyzes that system. Mises' analysis was based on the economic calculation problem, a critique of central planning first outlined in 1920 journal articles. His argument was that the Soviet Union would find itself increasingly unable to set correct prices for the goods and services it produced:
We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely on the preceding age of capitalism [for the purpose of determining prices]. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1989 derive from knowledge of the prices of 1949?
Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Lenin, who firmly believed that an international revolution was coming after the October Revolution, said in the 7th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks): You wanted the revolution to reckon with you. But history has taught you a lesson. It is a lesson, because it is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed—perhaps not in Petrograd, not in Moscow, but in Vladivostok, in more remote places to which perhaps we shall have to retreat, and the distance to which is perhaps greater than the distance from Petrograd to Moscow. At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.Although this was said before the German Revolution, it still shows the attitude Lenin could have had after the failure of the German Revolution.
Leon Trotsky One of the founders of the USSR, later expelled by Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky devoted much of his time in exile to the question of the Soviet Union's future. In time, he came to believe that a new revolution was necessary to depose the nomenklatura and reinstate working class rule as the first step to socialism. In 1936 he made the following prediction:
World War II In 1941 Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany decided to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht and other Axis military forces invaded the Soviet Union, and the Red Army retreated. Hitler predicted, "we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down".
Military observers around the world watched closely. It appears that most of them shared Hitler's opinion, expecting that Germany would win, destroy the Soviet system, and establish a Nazi New Order in Europe. Very few American experts thought the Soviet Union would survive. The German invasion began on 22 June 1941. Subsequently, the United States Department of War advised Franklin D. Roosevelt that the German army would conquer the Soviet Union within one to three months.Kershaw, Ian (2007). Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed The World 1940–1941, p. 298. Penguin Books Ltd, London, United Kingdom. In July 1941 the American general staff issued memoranda to the American press that a Soviet collapse was to be expected within several weeks.Bahm, Karl (2001). Berlin 1945: The Final Reckoning, p. 8. Amber Books Ltd. British analysts held similar views, believing that Germany would win within three to six weeks without heavy losses.Reynolds, David. From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the International History of the 1940s, p. 98. Oxford University Press.
Predictions of an expected Soviet defeat had an important impact on President Roosevelt; while the United States was not at the time at war, Roosevelt favored the Allies (represented primarily at that time by the British Empire and the Soviet Union), and decided to try to avert the collapse of the USSR by extending to the Soviets (October 1941) the supply of munitions through Lend-Lease (which had started in March 1941), and also to pressure Japan not to attack while the USSR was so vulnerable. The Red Army held the line at the outskirts of Moscow (December 1941) and predictions of Soviet collapse changed to "uncertain".
Early Cold War
George Orwell George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, wrote in 1946 that "the Russian regime will either democratize itself or it will perish".Orwell, George. "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution." London: 1946. He was regarded by US historian Robert Conquest as one of the first people who made such a prediction. According to a Conquest article published in 1969, "In time, the Communist world is faced with a fundamental crisis. We can not say for certain that it will democratize itself. But every indication is that it will, as Orwell said, either democratize itself or perish...We must also, though, be prepared to cope with cataclysmic changes, for the death throes of the more backward apparatus may be destructive and dangerous".Robert Conquest The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History., W.W. Norton and Company (2004), , p. 217; citation from New York Times Magazine, August 18, 1969
George Kennan American diplomat George F. Kennan proposed his famous containment theory in 1946–47, arguing that, if the Soviet Union were not allowed to expand, it would soon collapse. In the X Article he wrote:
The United States would have to undertake this containment alone and unilaterally, but if it could do so without undermining its own economic health and political stability, the Soviet party structure would undergo a period of immense strain eventually resulting in "either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power."
Kennan later regretted the manner in which his theory was received and implemented, but it nevertheless became a core element of American strategy, which consisted of building a series of military alliances around the USSR.
Winston Churchill Winston Churchill made repeated claims about the imminent fall of the Soviet Union throughout his political career. In January 1920, he denounced Bolshevism as a "rule of men who in their insane vanity and conceit believe they are entitled to give a government to a people which the people loathe and detest... The attempt to carry into practice those wild theories can only be attended with universal confusion, corruption, disorder and civil war." Later, he made a similar prediction in a journal article in 1931. After World War II, speaking about the recently established Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, he stated in 1954: "The forces of the human spirit and of national character alive in those countries cannot be speedily extinguished even by large-scale movements of populations and mass education of children." And in the epilogue to the one volume edition of his World War II memoirs, published in 1957, Churchill wrote: "The natural forces are working with greater freedom and greater opportunity to fertilize and vary the thoughts and the power of individual men and women. They are far bigger and more pliant in the vast structure of a mighty empire than could ever have been conceived by Marx in his hovel... Human society will grow in many forms not comprehended by a party machine."Warren, Spencer. (1999) A Philosophy of International Politics in Churchill's "Iron Curtain" Speech Fifty Years Later, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, MO.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union on several occasions. In a 2006 interview, Brzezinski stated that in his 1950 master's thesis (which has not been published) he argued that "the Soviet Union was pretending to be a single state but in fact it was a multinational empire in the age of nationalism. So the Soviet Union would break up."
As an academic at Columbia University, Brzezinski wrote numerous books and articles that "took seriously the option of collapse", including Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (1969) and Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (1970).