[flavius29663]

And very few people look at what topped it off: the cold war. The insane pressure from the US caused USSR to overspend on military when then barely fed their population. I think people should say "US won the cold war" rather than "the cold war ended" or "the USSR collapsed". It didn't collapse on it's own...as bad as communism was for the population, they could have potentially carry it on forever, like North Korea, if it wasn't for the US pressure.

[avmich]

It's interesting that likely the biggest beneficiaries of Cold War ending were Russians, not Americans. So maybe US won the cold war - even though they were really worried about collapse of USSR and creation of multiple states instead the former one - but Russians certainly got something out of that collapse.

EDIT: and by "Russians" here I rather mean "former Soviet citizens".

[merpnderp]

It's not like the US kept it a secret that they wanted to either gain enough of a military advantage over the USSR to remove them as a viable threat or force them to keep spending ever more amounts of resources on military boondoggles.