The Soviet Union would have collapsed with or without Gorbachev — in a different form, on someone else's watch, at some later date.

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• The fall of the Soviet Union was not a one-off event but the continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that began in 1917 and was merely arrested by the Bolsheviks. SPSerhii Plokhy4 Mar 2024
• The collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union were three different processes, and people constantly confuse them. SPSerhii Plokhy4 Mar 2024
• The Soviet Union fell in good part because of the mobilisation over Chernobyl: the first mass demonstrations in Ukraine were about radiation, not about language or autonomy. SPSerhii Plokhy4 Mar 2024
• The United States did not bring down the Soviet Union: it did not want the Soviet Union to disintegrate, at the start of the Cold War or in 1991. SPSerhii Plokhy4 Mar 2024

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