Experts did not predict the fall of the Soviet empire. Nor did its rulers. Millions of people brought it down by breaking through closed borders and defying what had previously seemed the invincible forces of the state. With hindsight it seems inevitable. But it was unimaginable for most people at the time—until it actually happened.
This seems the almost invariable pattern, whether in the fall of far-flung empires or in revolutions within single states. No one expected a French Revolution that would bring Louis XVI to the guillotine. No one expected an upper-class rebellion in Palermo in 1848 to turn the whole of Europe upside down. Who thought the suicide of a street trader in Tunisia in 2010 could do the same to the Arab world? The German empire collapsed in 1918 only months after the end of the First World War. Despite emerging victorious from the Second World War, the French and British empires began unravelling just as Paris and London were planning new colonial partnerships.
During the 1970s, when revolutions seemed on the cards – but weren’t – social scientists tried predictive models. Perhaps if one could identify the tipping point in popular discontent, or look for tell-tale signs of “disappointed expectations”, one could anticipate or prevent political collapse.
That never truly worked. Lenin, who knew a bit about such matters, gave a clue: “it is not enough for the lower classes to refuse to live in the old way; it is necessary also that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way”. States – even medieval and early modern states such as Louis XVI’s France – can usually defeat internal dissent. Stone throwing mobs stood little chance against soldiers firing grapeshot, and even less against tear gas, water cannon and tanks.
So for states and empires to fail, it usually needs an external force that not only undermines their prestige and ability to intimidate, but weakens their repressive capacity. In most cases, this is military failure. Sometimes the effect is clear and direct, as when the Russian and German empires were brought down in 1917 and 1918 by their own soldiers refusing to fight and abandoning their rulers.
Sometimes it is more indirect, as when the British realised that, after an exhausting war, they could no longer govern a huge, diverse, and decreasingly acquiescent empire. The Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell, concluded in 1946 that “We have no longer the resources, nor I think the necessary prestige and confidence in ourselves”. The French took longer to reach that conclusion, and then it was the unwillingness of conscript soldiers and their families to fight a war in Algeria in the early 1960s that ended visions of a permanent French imperial “community”.
In all these cases it was not complete defeat or the physical destruction of armed forces that was decisive, but the perception that the struggle was not winnable or not for long. Soldiers and policemen will not willingly risk their lives, or their future careers, for a lost cause and a discredited regime. There comes a moment, often very sudden, when the Emperor’s nakedness becomes apparent, and the game changes. In Lenin’s phrase, the rulers “are unable” to carry on as before.
Russia seems evidently on that path: but when might the moment of truth come? It has gone through this before. In 1917, the mighty empire was fatally weakened by Germany, and in 1989, by the rigours of the Cold War. Twice it died, but soon resurrected in another form, under another emperor, even if large chunks (the Baltic states, the Central Asian colonies, the Eastern European dependencies) were missing. And now? Will Putin’s attempt to reconquer part of the empire precipitate its final demise?
China is there to pick up Asian possessions conquered in the 19th century, and Japan, Turkey and others also have claims. The Russian people’s best chance of a brighter future would be as a post-imperial democratic nation-state, rejecting the imperial ambitions of Putin and his like.
A fallen empire nevertheless leaves a long shadow. Part may be positive, as in the case of the Roman empire (and we might like to think, the British): language, culture, laws, infrastructure and institutions. But it also inevitably leaves chaos, violence and struggles for power. There is no painless outcome.
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