For those of you who existed during those years and before it became quite obvious in 1991, did anyone ever believe the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would fall apart?
I was still in middle school when it failed.
Given the general stupidity of mankind and what I saw on the news, I assumed that global thermonuclear war was an inevitability.
I was convinced I’d get vaporized in my sleep one night.
I assumed the USSR would live forever. The whole thing was a dumb idea, people had been miserable for decades, so the thing had already resisted common sense long enough that I figured it was invulnerable.
I always assumed its economic/political system would collapse. I tended to think they’d have a major recession/depression and then gradually move to a free market economy.
I thought their experience would be closer to say, China’s, which has been gradual, but I did expect instability.
I didn’t expect the Russians to lose so much land, though. I presumed Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and the other Soviet Republics to all remain under Russian thumb in perpetuity, regardless of the economic system changing.
Yeah, never expected it to break up the way it did.
No. I’m still amazed how quickly the whole thing happened. There was no real warning. Obviously the economies of Russia and eastern Europe were not good and obviously the people had no political freedom but all that is true of lots of dictatorial regimes and they can still stumble on for decades.
If Gorbachev hadn’t happened along I guess it would all still be there today
+1
I was well into adulthood when it happened. Up to that point in my life, no other country that I knew of had fallen. Instead, Eastern European countries seemed to be under the thumb of the USSR, and if things like the Prague Spring came along, the Big Bear put a stop to it. That was my only experience through the sixties, seventies, and in to the eighties. The idea of a country failing just wasn’t something that happened. The map was considered static.
I assumed that if the war ever got hot, humanity was gone.
If it didn’t get hot then both the USSR and US would collapse from exhaustion.
Naught but the USD’s reserve currency status holding that back.
I was in the USAF at the time.
The DoD was dead certain they were going to last indefinitely and they’d eventually start WWIII as part of one or another unmanaged leadership changeover. Our job was to finish WWIII before the whole world got incinerated.
Very much like the situation in Korea today, but with much larger stakes.
As a kid in the 50s & 60s I was pretty sure we were gonna eventually launch at least some nukes at each other. Whether that’d be the full monte or just enough to knock out somebody’s leadersihp was an imponderable.
The entire DoD establishment was quite amazed whern the place just imploded & then didn’t turn into something like Iraq was 4 years ago. (net of Chechnya & a few other places most of you have never heard of)
I’m not an older Doper, but I do remember thinking that the Soviets may nuke us in when I was in kindergarten.
I went to a…rather…conservative…elementary school.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in the coldest part of the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union would simply collapse under its own weight was something unimaginable. It was sort of like seeing the Wicked Witch of the West melt after having water thrown on her. And the idea that it would fragment into 15 different countries was even more far fetched. (I recall reading a science fiction story once where such a thing happened.)
It never occurred to me that if would fail. But I think that’s mostly the tendency of people to think that whatever is happening now is what is normal and how it will always be. That kind of sudden, massive change just seems impossible.
In retrospect, it seems obvious. But at the time it seemed like the Soviet Union always had been.
I personally was amazed it happened both so suddenly and so peacefully. Working in the DOD world at the time, I think many others like me were as well. Even AFTER the fall things went amazingly smoothly IMO.
IMO I think this may be somewhat (ironically) due to the fact that the Soviets expected (maybe DEMANDED) that their citizens be literate and educated and work for a living (or ELSE).
Contrast that with many other regimes that fail. The government topples (or the USA takes out their ass) and a shit storm ensues because the populace is a bunch of idiots (IMO).
I was in my mid-thirties when the USSR fell.
The Berlin wall came down in 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. The former was a surprise to me, the latter less so. The Solidarity movement was another sign that the USSR was on its last legs.
At the time I knew the USSR was under a lot of strain, and that Gorbachev and other leaders were desperately trying to hold things together. It seemed clear that things were going to change, but I didn’t predict how they would change, i.e. that the USSR would completely dissolve without any violence.
What’s the title, because that writer would be a genius.
The Mirror Mirror ep. of the original Star Trek made me realize (I was in my teens, understand) that it was doomed sooner or later-eventually a Spock-like reformer would happen along who would realize the whole rotten illogical structure would need to be dismantled and rebuilt. The question then became the timing-said reformer could happen along any time now, or 200 years later. In this timeline he appeared only a few years after my revelation.
I guess I’m officially an “older Doper” now. 
I’ll be different than everyone else, and suggest that it didn’t happen suddenly. Well, maybe in the historical perspective it was sudden, in that it didn’t take decades. But at the time, there was glasnost, Hungary’s opening its western borders, and the fall of The Wall, Yugoslavia, and East Germany. At this point it was almost a fait accompli that the Soviet system would fall apart.
Yikes! Am I an older doper? I was born in 1966.
I went to East Germany (including East Berlin) and the USSR in early 1989 as part of a study abroad program. Never occurred to me that things would fall apart so soon afterwards.
I knew they had shortages and problems, but I figured they’d always had them and things were stable.
Followed the Moskva, down to Gorky Park, Listening to the winds of change…
Never in a million years did I consider this. And within a few scant years Russian hockey players were playing in the NHL, and Russian engineers were working in companies alongside me. And they were… gasp!.. normal people: with wives, and kids, and hopes and aspirations…
My theory is they ran out of either vodka or toilet paper and that was it! 
But seriously, I would love to hear if my theory of an educated populace was important.
Yugoslavia was non-aligned, not in the Soviet sphere. They began to break up when Tito died. Not really connected to the other stuff.
Things were happening across the soviet world under Gorbachev but I don’t think there was much warning pre-Gorbachev. So it was quick in that sense. And I think I always assumed that Gorby would lose power somehow - removed, “died” whatever and some hardline lot would be in power and reverse everything. Soviet Union just seemed to be one old hardline dude followed by another.
And I don’t think this thread is restricted to “older dopers”. I was only early 20s in '89. Makes us sound like a bunch of grumpy old timers.