Collapse of an Empire

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1. dh2022Jun 2025
   If you really want to find out the reasons why USSR failed I suggest reading “Collapse the fall of Soviet Union” by Zubok or “Collapse of an Empire” by Gaidar. They are easy to read books. Said reasons are quite different from what is going on in USA at the moment.
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2. iguyJan 2021
   > Egor Gaidar [1] is an excellent source

   This is published in English as [1] Yegor Gaidar, "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia".

   TLDR is maybe this [2] write-up of a talk, 8 pages, very interesting.

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-Modern-Russia...

   [1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaid...

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3. earlFeb 2009
   To be fair, one point at least seems accurate -- falling oil prices will probably doom Russia's government. This has happened before: see this very interesting book by economist and former Russian PM Yegor Gaidar: Collapse of an Empire. I can't recommend it enough. But basically, his thesis is the reason communist Russia fell was oil prices fell below the level needed to support spending and because of structural deficiencies in the Communist government they were unwilling to confront this problem. Hopefully this is a lesson only for Russian and Venezuela, and not the USA :(

   Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815731140

   You can read an excerpt for free here: http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filter.all/pub_d...

   or here: http://scribd.com/doc/12796808

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4. dh2022Sep 2025
   Well, yeah, sure, they are building lots of shitty weapons. Meanwhile they cannot take over an adversary a third of its size. About resource extraction - the West stopped giving Russia extraction technology. Which means Russia is coasting on what they had up to 2022. Meaning in a few years Russia will do what it did in the 70s: over-extract its most productive fields. To see how that movie ended read Gaidar's Collapse of an Empire.
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5. paganelJan 2019
   > Either they produced too little

   I think they produced too little and at some point the US wheat market became off-limits for them. There's this Wikipedia article [1] stating how because of a failed crop the URSS basically bought everything they could get their hand on from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (this was happening in 1972), and I also found this 1982 Foreign Affairs article [2] that detailed the reasons why URSS had become a net grain importer by that time. Also, apparently Russian PM and economist Yegor Gaidar said that the fall of the URSS was partially caused by the "wheat situation", combined with a decrease in the price of oil in the 1980s [3]

   > But there was a more immediate explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union provided by Yegor Gaidar, who had been acting prime minister of Russia from June of 1992 to December of 1992 and a key figure in the transformation of the Russian economy. In his last work, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, published in 2007 Gaidar provides a powerful explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet agriculture had stagnated in the 1980's but the demand for grain in the cities was increasing. It was necessary to buy grain in the international market. While the price of petroleum was high it was feasible to finance the purchase of grain from internal sources. When the price of petroleum fell in the late 1980's the Soviet Union needed to borrow the funds from Western banks to purchase the needed grain. This severely restricted the international activities of the Soviet Union. It could not send in Soviet troops to put down the rebellions against communism in Eastern Europe because such an action would have resulted in a refusal of Western sources to lend the money needed. Likewise the attempted coup d'état was doomed to failure because the coup leaders would not have been able to borrow the funds needed to stave off starvation in the major cities.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_grain_robbery

   [2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/1982-03-0...

   [3] http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sovietcollapse.htm

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6. listicNov 2010
   Yegor Gaidar's book is on Amazon:

   "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia" http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-Modern-Russia/...

   The description and reviews are very comprehensive.

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