Leon Aron stresses the role "ideas and ideals" played in the Soviet collapse:
Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons — economic, political, social — why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed?
(Photo by Russian photoblogger Tanya Zommer, in a series entitled "Nerds On Yachts")
The Dish 