In August 1991, when forces loyal to the newly elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin emerged victorious during the failed communist putsch, protestors tore down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in the square that bore his name. The statue honoring the founder of the Cheka, the communist secret police which evolved later into the KGB, symbolized Soviet power; its fall was historic. Across the street stood Lubyanka, the notorious KGB headquarters; its security police watched from the windows, loaded weapons in hand. People on the street could easily see them from the Square. The KGB did not lift a finger against the protestors. Nor did they speak in defense of their “Dear Iron Felix.” They silently let Dzerzhinsky fall, and the myth of the “great” Soviet Union fell along with him. The guardians of Marx and Lenin’s ideals had stopped believing in them.
Still, many in the West continued to believe the Soviet Union was resilient. In the fall of 1990, H. Bradford Westerfield, a Yale University Professor, refused to change his “Introduction to International Relations” syllabus, which assumed the permanence of the bipolar, Cold War world. “[H]ardly anyone in the summer of 1991 predicted that the USSR itself would fall apart by the end of the year,” wrote the Hungarian-born journalist and author Victor Sebestyen. Indeed, some still believe its collapse was not inevitable. One former U.S. diplomat who served in Moscow called the USSR’s demise an accident of history, insisting in 2011 that
