The Soviet Union is a stable superpower. Gorbachev's reforms are strengthening the system, not threatening it.
The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika accelerated rather than prevented collapse. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
What changed?
When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1987, it was described, correctly, as a historic achievement, the first arms control agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. It was also read, across much of the analytical community, as evidence that the Soviet system had found a way to adapt. Gorbachev's reforms, glasnost, the opening of public debate; perestroika, the restructuring of the economy, were understood by most Western observers as modernization efforts that would make the USSR more stable, not less.
The social studies classes of 1987-88 taught the Cold War as the permanent framework of international relations. Students mapped the world in blocs. They understood détente and confrontation as the oscillating poles of a stable bipolarity that would define geopolitics for the foreseeable future. The Soviet Union was a superpower with nuclear parity, a massive military, and the administrative capacity to govern one-sixth of the Earth's land surface. That it might simply cease to exist was not a scenario most curricula contemplated.
The analysts who dissented, those who argued that the nationalities problem, the economic stagnation, and the contradictions of the reform process could unravel the system, were not absent, but they were minority voices. CIA assessments of Soviet economic strength were substantially overoptimistic, as later reviews found. The think tanks and universities that produced foreign policy analysis had invested decades in understanding how the Soviet system worked; they were somewhat slower to model how it might fail.
The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. East Germans had been crossing into Hungary and Austria through a newly opened border; when a confused announcement made it sound as if the Wall crossing restrictions had been lifted immediately, crowds gathered and the guards, receiving no orders, stood aside. Within hours, Berliners were tearing the Wall apart with hammers.
The students who graduated in June 1988 and went to college that fall spent their first semester studying a bipolar world and their second watching the framework collapse. The Soviet Union itself dissolved in December 1991. The geopolitical structure their entire education had taught them to navigate was gone before many of them had their first jobs.
