Sarah Paine

It's suicide on purpose.

And what it does is it opens the door for multiple parties and for the nationalities within the Soviet empire to become independent.

All right.

So I've given you internal explanations.

I've given you external explanations.

Now I'm going to give you some umbrella explanations.

And they're based on all the preceding evidence.

And they come to opposite conclusions.

The first one was, well, any of the above, it's inevitable.

And the opposite conclusion from the same evidence is, no, no, no, it took all of the above, the West barely won.

So I'm going to start with

any of the above, you could argue with this many serious problems, it was a matter of time before the Soviet Union collapsed.

And it was an objectionable system for precisely the reasons the West didn't like it.

It had a brutally inefficient economic system.

And Russians who invented the thing at the end of the day didn't want it either.

So by this way of looking at it, you have people like Yuri Ryzhkov, a genuine rocket scientist, who says, look, the main reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union is the rottenness of its system.

And then here's a journalist, Timura Stepanov, who said, look, I think from the beginning, the genes of disintegration were contained in the genetics of this governmental political formation.

Don't you love the products of the Soviet educational system?

Don't ever use wording like that.

All right, so you could argue that the Soviet Union was destined to fail with this many problems.