The Soviet Crisis Was Predictable. Its Outcome Was Not.

Until 1991, it was impossible to be on the Left and not have an opinion about the Soviet Union. Moscow was, remarks Mark Smith in his of the post–Joseph Stalin Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the center of half the world. That world’s fate seemed to hang on the changing relationship of the United States and the USSR.new history Today, the USSR is gone. Its once biggest components, Russia and Ukraine, are fighting each other. China and other countries loom larger in the questions we…