Why the Soviet collapse still surprises historians

Welcome to the penultimate episode of Origin story season eight: the story of socialism. We close the book on Soviet communism with the story of how it all came crashing down — what has been called the most unexpected event of the twentieth century.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to change his country was a product of the secret speech in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As he climbed the ladder to power, he witnessed the Soviet Union flinch from reform and slide into stagnation and decline. So when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 he sought to rejuvenate the regime with three audacious innovations: perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness) and democratisation.

It was a punishing task. Old hardliners in the Politburo thought Gorbachev was too radical while his populist arch-rival Boris Yeltsin thought him not daring enough. Gorbachev wanted to end the Cold War and open his country to the world but he did not foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. He certainly didn’t want the USSR itself to come undone two years later. But the desire for change that he had unleashed could not be tamed.

By 1991, Gorbachev was lionised abroad and loathed at home. A failed coup attempt set off a rapid chain of events that ended not just his leadership but the Communist Party and the USSR itself. In trying to save his country, he ended up enabling its destruction. The era of world history that began in 1917 was over.

Why did the Soviet Union prove impossible to reform? Did Gorbachev move too fast or too slowly? How significant was his vicious feud with Yeltsin? Did the US bungle the USSR’s transition to a capitalist democracy and misread the collapse of its rival superpower? What did this do to the hopes of socialists around the world? And how do the tumultuous events of 1985-91 still shape the world today?

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Reading list

• Sven Beckert – Capitalism: A Global History (2025)

• Francis Fukuyama – ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989)

• Anna Funder – Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2004)

• Masha Gessen – The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)

• Mikhail Gorbachev – Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987)

• Leslie Holmes – Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• Stephen Kotkin – Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (2001)

• Serhii Plokhy – The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014)

• Robert Service – Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• Tom Stoppard – Rock’n’Roll (2006)

• William Taubman – Gorbachev: His Life and Times (2017)

• Mikhail Zygar – The Dark Side of the Earth: How the Soviet Union Collapsed but Remained (2025)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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