ABSTRACT
The collapse of a vast empire, and with it a social experiment, ideology, and way of life, is a rare thing to witness. The break up of the Soviet Union, and the bloc it controlled, although at one level not inevitable and the result of a series of specific actions, pressures and decisions in East and West which sabotaged the belated new thinking of Gorbachev and his supporters, can be seen, at another level, as the result of a massive, long term failure, and consequent popular rejection of a powerful hegemonic discourse. Despite ubiquitous and co-ordinated statecontrolled networks for propagating the views of the ruling Communist Parties, the gap between what most people were experiencing in their lives and hearing through unofficial networks, and what they were being fed by their hegemonic, but unsubtle media and education systems, became so large and self-evident that confidence in the leadership and the ideology it was promoting had, for the majority, long since evaporated. It proved to be beyond restoration, even by the glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) promised by Gorbachev.
