When the kgb chief Yuri Andropov became the Soviet leader in 1982, candidates for office besieged him. Whenever someone began, “Let me tell you about myself,” Andropov replied: “What makes you think you know more about yourself than I know about you?”

The totalitarian Soviet Union, which kept such a close eye on its citizens, seemed stable, but it collapsed with incredible speed. Almost no one expected that, by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union would no longer exist and that fifteen squabbling republics would take its place. Why did this happen? This is the puzzle that Vladislav Zubok, once a researcher for the Soviet expert Strobe Talbott, sets out to explain in Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.1

Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously described a “black swan” as a highly unlikely event that, after it happens, falsely seems as if it had been inevitable. Analysts who did not anticipate the end of the Soviet Union described it in retrospect as bound to happen. In fact, as Zubok demonstrates, the course of events ending in the country’s disintegration was anything but inevitable. Only a “hard-core determinist” who disregards the evidence, he asserts, could examine the details of what happened and conclude that no other outcome was possible. There were many turning points, and choices made a difference, as did accidents like Chernobyl. The result also depended crucially on the personalities of the leaders, especially the Communist Party leader Mikhail