Chapter Eleven - The Collapse

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Collapse

BY THE END of the 1980s, the whole thing was wobbling.

The Soviet Union had spent decades expanding its influence, crushing dissent, and pretending its economy wasn’t falling apart. Behind the propaganda, it was rotting from the inside. Not just economically, but ideologically. The dream was gone. All that remained was bureaucracy, stagnation, and fear.

Then suddenly, almost no one expected it, the whole set collapsed mid-scene.

But don’t let the clean footage fool you. The collapse wasn’t clean. And the story that got told afterward was just as warped as the one that came before.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He didn’t want to destroy the system. He wanted to fix it.

He introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), hoping to bring transparency and reform. He loosened censorship. He allowed some criticism. He relaxed economic control. Let a little capitalism in. Let a little freedom out.

But once the pressure valve cracked, the whole machine started screaming.

Reforms exposed rot. People got louder. Nationalist movements surged in the republics. The economy got worse. The people who had tolerated the lines, shortages, and silence suddenly wanted out.

In 1989, one of the most iconic symbols of division crumbled.

The Berlin Wall, which had split East and West Germany since 1961, was breached. Not by tanks, not by treaties, by people. Crowds gathered. Guards stood down. Hammers came out. Concrete came down.

It was a TV-friendly metaphor: freedom wins. Tyranny loses.
And to most of the world, it looked like the final nail in communism’s coffin.

Other regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in a domino effect. Poland. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. Romania. The dominoes fell anyway.
And by 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.

The West celebrated like it had scored the final touchdown in a century-long game.

Capitalism was declared the winner. Liberal democracy was hailed as inevitable. Intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama even wrote that this was “the end of history.” The final form of human government had arrived and the battle of ideologies was over.

Markets would spread. Freedom would blossom. The dream was dead.
And everyone could stop worrying about communism forever.

That was the story.

It wasn’t the truth.

For the people actually living it, the collapse wasn’t a victory parade.

It was chaos. Factories shut down. Food prices exploded. Savings vanished. Mafia groups took over industries. Oligarchs rose. Russia’s life expectancy dropped. Homelessness skyrocketed. Corruption went nuclear.

The Soviet system had been oppressive. But for many, it had also guaranteed food, housing, healthcare, and education. When it disappeared overnight, nothing filled the vacuum except shock therapy. And it hit like a sledgehammer.

In much of the former Eastern Bloc, it didn’t feel like liberation.
It felt like being sold off.

The collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t kill communism.
It killed the illusion that state-controlled authoritarianism was the only way to try it.

But in the West, that distinction was lost. Communism had failed, full stop.
No nuance. No conversation. Just a single sentence: “It doesn’t work.”

And that sentence became the default setting for the next thirty years.

Even when wealth inequality soared.
Even when housing became unaffordable.
Even when wages stagnated and billionaires ballooned.
Even when capitalism failed its own people over and over again.

The answer was always:
“Well, at least it’s not communism.”
As if that were still the only comparison left.