Predictions of Soviet Collapse

Predictions Of Soviet Collapse

There were people who predicted that the Soviet Union would eventually be dissolved before the process of dissolution began with the Polish Round Table Agreement in April 1989.

Authors often credited with having predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union include Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere) (1976), economist Ravi Batra in his 1978 book The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Additionally, Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such as Problems of Communism and Survey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime." In the United States, chiefly among conservatives, the politician most credited with predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Union is President Ronald Reagan.

Many of the predictions made before 1980 about the fall of the Soviet Union were considered by those who uttered them as a somewhat remote possibility rather than a probability. However, for some (such as Amalrik and Todd) the idea was much more than a passing thought. Whether any particular prediction was correct is still a matter of debate, since the reasons for the Soviet Union's actual collapse may be different from the reasons given by the various authors in their predictions.

Some of the predictions are mutually exclusive, in the sense that they present incompatible views of the Soviet collapse (if one of them is correct, the others must be incorrect). On the other hand, there are also certain groups of predictions that are compatible with each other.