ABSTRACT
In the second half of the 1980s, a bewildered world looked on as the world’s largest territorial state-the successor to the Tsarist Empire-fell apart in national self-assertion and ethnic rivalry. The central authorities found themselves unable to cope with the mounting pressures, and at the end of 1991 a system that had prided itself on its capacity to embrace many different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic groups, and had held them together in a powerful state with significant material and cultural achievements to its credit, rapidly collapsed.
