I was in my very early 20s and never would have believed it. The funny thing is, though, that IIRC the whole aim of America’s Cold War containment strategy was more or less what actually happened: keep the Soviet bear in check until his system collapsed from within. I guess once detente came along in the 70s this scenario was forgotten.
At that time, Gorbachev was attempting to institute major changes in how the Soviet Union operated. It seemed likely (to me, at least) that the USSR was going through some significant structural change, at the minimum.
The Quebec issue has been debated for as long as I’ve been alive; to an outsider, if anything, it seemed more likely 25 years ago than it does today (though I’d be very interested to hear Canadian / Quebecois views on it).
I wouldn’t discount the possibility of another significant map-redrawing in my lifetime. It seems like, today, the most likely area in which this could happen is the Middle East, but, as the example above shows, I suspect it may be very difficult to see these sorts of events happening until they’re on top of you.
Brain Wave by Poul Anderson. All humans and all animals in the world suddenly become five times smarter than they were before. This results in the fall of most governments, including the Soviet Union. But the bit about the breakup is just a sentence.
At the risk of upsetting my Quebecois friends, I’ll suggest that all Quebecois are Canadians, just as Albertans are Canadians, and Ontarians are Canadians, and Prince Edward Islanders are Canadians.
Do Coloradans, Virginians, Wisconsans, Texans, etc. consider themselves something other than Americans? If not, I’m left wondering why you would ask such a question.
No, I didn’t think it would collapse like it did. As I remember, I was glued to the news shows while it was going on, and I compared watching it to getting hooked on a soap opera. You couldn’t believe the storyline, but it was all true, and it was riveting to watch.
East Germans getting into West Germany through Hungary, watching the Berlin Wall come down, the eastern bloc countries falling one by one. The Soviet Republics breaking off, one by one. (This last was fascinating to me because I am half-Latvian, and suddenly Latvia’s back baby!!) And then, there was that whole Gorbachev getting kidnapped thing. My god, it was must see TV every day! And then came Romania, and on and on…
And meanwhile in the White House, Millie the first dog was having puppies…
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis. (I was 8 when Chicago sounded the air raid sirens for the White Sox winning the AL pennant and panicked a lot of people for a few minutes.)
I really did think there would be a nuclear war, although I didn’t obsess about it and lived a normal life.
The Berlin Wall coming down was just unthinkable to me before it happened. A crackdown as in 1968 in Prague was a real possibility.
When the USSR did fall, it was almost too good to be believed. I lived near San Francisco at the time, and a Soviet navy vessel docked there and allowed the general public to visit, so I went. They flew the US flag along with the Soviet flag! It was a practically surreal experience, something I NEVER thought would happen.
I was in my late 20s when the Berlin Wall fell, almost 30 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Together, the end of the Cold War is perhaps the greatest historical surprise I have experienced in my life, with the possible exception of 9/11. Up till that point I assumed that the Soviet Bloc would last indefinitely.
I was in my early to mid 20s when it happened. By the mid 80s, I didn’t think the USSR would survive in the long term but I expected the complete collapse to take about 20 years. I didn’t see it falling apart as quickly as it did in 1991.
Don’t backpedal, it’s undignified. 
Found a used copy online and ordered it. Sounds like my kinda fun. Thanks!
Sure, over in GD?
Well glasnost, sure, but the rest happened awfully fast. It was just a few months from Hungary opening its border with Austria in August 1989, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, to Ceaușescu’s being deposed and executed in December, ending the last of the Communist governments in the Warsaw Pact countries other than the USSR itself.
I was 35 that year. I’d always figured the Soviet Union and its Eastern European zone of hegemony would eventually fall, but I was hardly sure that I’d live long enough to see it. It still gives me goosebumps that it happened at all.
After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, I assumed that we’d eventually pry the Baltics free, because they’d been a part of the USSR for a much shorter time than the other Soviet ‘republics,’ and the United States government (along with much of the Western world) still recognized the three Baltic republics as independent entities. The pre-Communist governments of those countries still had embassies in Washington, D.C. But even in 1990 and the first half of 1991, I didn’t think the other component parts of the USSR would split off.
We’d have bull sessions about stuff like this when I was in college (1977-83), and I’d go way out on a limb by predicting that, in our lifetimes, the Soviet Union would lose control over eastern Europe. This was a really radical prediction at the time. I never, ever, thought we would see the Soviet Union fall. The Soviet people just seemed so, I don’t know, beaten down and docile.
That is the thing about political change. It is impossible until it is inevitable. Look how quickly Hitler came to power. Look how quickly he fell.
I’ve seen mentions of the Soviet Union in 1980s science fiction that takes place far into the future (OK, Star Trek), and didn’t doubt that they were right. I didn’t think that WWIII would ever come, but I figured that someone like Gorbachev would come along, cool things down on both sides, and the USSR would keep on keeping on, but as a “kinder, gentler, Communism” (as someone said before, yeah, I guess China is a better analogy, but with the famous Chinese repressions being less brutal in this USSR). I figured that a majority of the Soviet republics would stay on this way (after all most of them has been part of Russia pretty much since the days of Peter the Great (with the exception of some short-lived independences around the Revolution of Ukraine and the Caucasus). I was surprised to see it fall apart, but, being a geography geek into maps and flags was excited to see the new changes! And, I guess if it hadn’t fallen apart I might not have started getting into national anthems, a hobby I greatly enjoy now, and have been considered a leading expert on.
I’m wondering how you could “stare at the TV in utter disbelief”, as it didn’t really happen in a single news event, as was pointed out before, a few Dopers saw the Berlin Wall fell and thought the Soviet Union would survive that.
I suppose the defining moment on TV that said “the USSR is officially done and gone” is Gorbachev’s resignation on Christmas Day (non-Orthodox Christmas), 1991. But, by then even the densest idiot in the world knew the USSR was gone, it was just a matter of making it official.
I am curious, Bosda, what was the defining moment on TV that you “stared at in utter disbelief”?
I believed there was a 50% chance of it collapsing under its own weight, and a 50% chance of us beating them in a war. But I never thought it would happen so fast, or not even in my lifetime.
Yes, please. I was thinking that or MPSIMS.
It makes me feel old that something that happened in 1991 is being characterized as something remembered by “older Dopers.” 
I was not shocked, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I was a little surprised that it happened so quickly.
I thought about the fall of the Soviet Union as sort of akin to how I used to think about the possibility of a black President - something that I recognized was vaguely possible and might happen sometime in my lifetime, but it happened sooner and more suddenly than I thought it would.
No, absolutely not. Truth be told, it’s still a little unreal.
Me also. But the idea that it could sustain itself if Gorbachev hadn’t come along doesn’t wash. It perhaps would eventually have dissolved into chaos and bloodshed if a less practical man had been in charge, but the USSR had bankrupted itself on weapons and military. Serious discontent among the population was rampant, especially with the younger generation, and it was only a matter of time before it all came crashing down. Gorbachev was at least able to salvage a civil turnover of government instead of another revolution. The USSR seemed invincible and very scary when I was growing up, with lunatics like Krushchev and other remnants of the Battle of Stalingrad in charge.
I would have said the same thing about the Peoples Republic of China in 1968. Or 1976. Or 1989.
And yet, here we are. Reforming, but never collapsing. Yet.