The Soviet Union fell chiefly from within, not from Western pressure

Evidence

It is true that Washington became more confrontational in the 1980s, but things like Ronald Reagan’s famous “Star Wars program” had little to do with the end of the Bolshevik project. Far more important was that Gorbachev, a man who revered Lenin, also believed that the fifteen Soviet republics and seven other Warsaw Pact member nations could reintegrate with the West into a new global system. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 105

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the book’s broader revisionist thread on how bottom-up narratives of change misattribute causation; Gorbachev collapse parallels the mass protest analysis. — connects to: Soviet collapse was elite-driven, not a product of mass protest — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 109; Soviet global power depended directly on its internal social organization — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1327

Broader Connections

• Soviet collapse was elite-driven, not a product of mass protest #expands (0.82) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 109
• Soviet global power depended directly on its internal social organization #corroborates (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1327