The botched coup that presaged the end of the Soviet Union
The best thing about the Soviet Union – arguably the only good thing – was the manner of its going. Though it lost its European empire when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, almost nobody predicted that the USSR itself would fall apart so quickly. Most historians, Moscow-based journalists and the world’s espionage agencies thought it would limp on for decades, like the Ottoman empire. Yet the world’s second most powerful state withered away, and not in the classical Marxist sense: it just ceased to exist. As Robert Service shows, the Soviet people destroyed the Soviet Union, not outsiders, and without any significant violence.
