Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Stephen Kotkin)

The history of the collapse of the Soviet Communist regime, and the lessons to found therein.

The written version of this review can be found here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2023/12/13/armageddon-averted-the-soviet-collapse-1970-2000-stephen-kotkin/

We strongly encourage, in these days of censorship and deplatforming, all readers to bookmark our main site:

https://www.theworthyhouse.com

and to subscribe for email notifications of new posts. The Worthy House does not solicit donations or other support, or have ads. You can subscribe for email notifications here:

https://theworthyhouse.com/subscribe-by-email

Other than at the main site, you can follow Charles here:

https://twitter.com/TheWorthyHouse
https://gab.com/TheWorthyHouse

This and all Worthy House narrations are offered with accurate closed captions (not auto-generated).

"All of history is littered with dead empires. Since the so-called Enlightenment, history is also littered with dead regimes—governments built around an ideology, which in time collapsed, entirely killing the ideology which birthed them or forcing it to mutate into something new. The Eastern European Communist regimes collapsed in 1989. Their hegemon regime, Soviet Communism, followed in 1991. Yet the Soviet regime did not use its power to preserve its Eastern European satrapies, nor did it act to preserve its own ideology, even though its elites still fervently believed in that ideology. Why? That is what Stephen Kotkin says he answers in Armageddon Averted. He doesn’t, but the history he covers is its own reward." . . .