AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
When you read the Russian archives, they were not as delusional as they seem today in the context of Ukraine. The next big event in the history of the USSR was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. And all of us know the story after nine years, Russia left and came back. But again, that war mattered disproportionately. It exerted a cost on the regime that 15,000 people died and 35,000 people were wounded. That led up to a country where the regime was on weak legs. Once again, a weak economy and a weak society, which depended on export of oil and the import of grain. We got to the collapse of the Soviet Union.