Russia Is Decaying Faster Than the Soviet Union

The supposed "superpower" is a Potemkin village.

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
October 23, 2014

It took two years for crumbling oil prices to bring the Soviet Union to its knees in the mid-1980s, and another two years of stagnation to break the Bolshevik empire altogether.

Russian ex-premier Yegor Gaidar famously dated the moment to September 1985, when Saudi Arabia stopped trying to defend the crude market, cranking up output instead. "The Soviet Union lost $20bn per year, money without which the country simply could not survive," he wrote.

The Soviet economy had run out of cash for food imports. Unwilling to impose war-time rationing, its leaders sold gold, down to the pre-1917 imperial bars in the vaults. They then had to beg for "political credits" from the West. That made it unthinkable for Moscow to hold down Eastern Europe’s captive nations by force, and the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians knew it.

"The collapse of the USSR should serve as a lesson to those who construct policy based on the assumption that oil prices will remain perpetu…