The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet collapse

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - a workers' and peasants' state - lasted a mere seventy years. It has been gone for a quarter of a century. Existing socialist states face many of the same external pressures that the Soviet Union faced; future socialist states will too. In addition to interference from the imperialist world, the socialist experiments thus far have faced a number of internal problems: how to maintain economic growth in the face of constantly changing needs and...