Collapse of an Empire : Lessons for Modern Russia

"My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse. . . ."?From the Introduction to Collapse of an EmpireThe Soviet Union was an empire in many senses of the word?a vast mix of far-flung regions and accidental citizens by way of conquest or annexation. Typical of such empires, it was built on shaky foundations. That instability made its demise inevitable, asserts Yegor Gaidar, former prime minister of Russia and architect of the ?shock therapy? economic reforms of the 1990s. Yet