The Soviet Collapse and the Origins of the Russian-Ukraine Conflict

Vladislav Zubok in his book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2022) offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR. In his talk, the author focuses on hard dilemmas faced by reformers of the authoritarian empire, and dwells on the causality of the economic crisis, political destabilization, and surprisingly quick collapse of the old statehood. The speaker also reflects on unintended consequences of what happened in 1991, including a conflict between the new Russia and the independent Ukraine. Collapse revisits the debates inside Russian democratic movement on how Moscow should deal with its national autonomies and ex-Soviet republics.

Vladislav M. Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His books include prize-winning A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), as well as Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Belknap Press, 2009), The Idea of Russia: the Life and Work of Dmitry Likhachev (I.B.Tauris, 2016), and Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021).

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Tolya Levshin
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Reimagining World Order (OWNER), Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

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