ABSTRACT
The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was one of the most unusual events in world history; it is probably the only case of a superpower and its empire collapsing in peacetime, and seemingly for largely internal reasons. Two basic conceptions or models have always dominated studies of Soviet society: the industrial-society model, which focuses on the features Soviet society had in common with other industrial societies, and the totalitarian-society model, which stresses those characteristics of Soviet society that distinguished it from the political systems of the West. The novelty of the Soviet experience is that its military-driven modernization endangered the foundations of long-term systemic reproduction and triggered the society's self-destructive dynamic. The Soviet Union and Soviet-type societies of Eastern Europe began, in the 1960s, to experience a continuous, long-term decline in labor productivity and rates of economic growth.
