Dahlia Ives

This book traces how the Soviet Union-built as a utopian laboratory of ideology-foundered on its own internal contradictions, from an unbalanced economy to suppressed national identities, as the very promise of the system eroded the legitimacy it claimed to represent. It treats the 1991 dissolution not as a single political shock but as the culmination of decades in which Marxist-Leninist dogma could no longer conceal the gap between plan and reality. Economic stagnation and centralised failure form the first layer: the command-economy model, militarised production, and the weight of the Cold War arms race created chronic shortages, misallocation, and technological lag, leaving the state unable to deliver the prosperity it had equated with socialist virtue.
The second layer is ethnic and federal fragmentation: the Soviet structure bundled many republics under one party, yet rising national consciousness, resentment of Moscow-driven Russification, and centrifugal ambitions in the Baltics, Ukraine, and the Caucasus turned federalism into a pressure vessel once censorship loosened. The third layer is the erosion of ideology itself: Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika exposed decades of repression, failed promises, and the system's dependence on coercion, so that once the public could see the machinery of power, the myth of a perfect, inevitable future no longer held.