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When Will Russia Collapse? We May Not Know When the Snow Will Fall, but We Know That Winter Is Coming
Russia is not the Soviet Union. But war spending, oil dependence, political conformity and an economy increasingly shaped by military demand are creating pressures that may eventually become impossible to contain.
Will Russia collapse?
It is an uncomfortable question, and perhaps an impossible one to answer with a date. Great powers rarely announce the day on which their systems will fail. The conditions for collapse usually develop quietly, accumulate over years and then become visible almost overnight.
The Soviet Union is the obvious historical comparison. Yet today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, and it would be a mistake to pretend otherwise. The Soviet economy was centrally planned and structurally rigid. Today’s Russia retains market mechanisms and has demonstrated a considerable ability to adapt to sanctions and external pressure. When the Soviet Union began to break apart, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and political reform weakened central control and allowed criticism, national movements and competing political forces to emerge. Today’s Kremlin, by contrast, exercises far tighter control over the information space and civil society.
