Sarah Paine

Small hitch.

In the late 1970s, there was a big recession, and it continued into the 80s, and it tanked commodity prices.

So for some of the newfound pals like Angola, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, it wrecked their export earnings because they're exporting commodities.

These commodity prices are down.

In many cases, it halved them.

The Soviet Union was really dependent on oil exports, still is.

Oil prices tanked.

And oil accounted for up to 55% of the Soviet budget.

So here...

Brezhnev has got a deep bench of non-performing pals at a time when he doesn't have the money to support all of them.

And worse yet from the Soviet point of view, so it's dumped all this money in these third world friends.

Meanwhile, it's got its own nationalities.

who are deeply unhappy and they want out of the empire.

And most problematically, they all revolt at exactly the same time.

And one of the rules for continental empire is no two front wars.

While Russia has so many fronts at this point, it can't even keep count.

And the unrest in the internal empire

of nationalities started as soon as Gorbachev got in.

There were student movements in Kazakhstan and Yakutia, opposite ends of things.

By the time you get to 1990, there were like 76 seething ethnic rebellions in different parts of this.