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The Soviet Union's ultimate doom was revealed overnight in August 1961 - when they had to put up a wall in Berlin to keep people from leaving the East Bloc in droves.
The imposition of Stalinism on so many unwilling nations by force of a Red Army occupation (in 1939 on the Baltics and in 1945 on the six satellite nations of Eastern Europe) guaranteed that the Soviet empire would one day prove unsustainable against national centripetal forces.
The future failure became obvious with the Wall. Reform was impossible because allowing freedoms of assembly and travel would quickly lead to collapse -- as became the case soon after such freedoms were allowed in the 1980s.
National resistance to political tyranny was as or more important in the Soviet collapse as the oft-cited economic stagnation of the highly centralized state socialist model.
The Cold War if anything may have served to sustain the Soviet model by providing an outside enemy and keeping power with the hardliners, whose use of force was thus legitimated.
The Western policy that most served to undermine the Soviets was the Ostpolitik adopted by West Germany in the 1970s under Brandt - the opening for detente. Once you had cultural exchanges and eight million West Germans visiting East Germany every year, it was guaranteed that East Germans would one day openly revolt in favor of the West German way of life. (How many Americans even know what Ostpolitik was?)
The Carter-Reagan* war build-up was superfluous to this process, if anything may have delayed it. Afghanistan had at most a peripheral impact in draining resources and ruining the myth of Soviet military might.
Look at the actual history of how it went down: the peoples of Eastern Europe fought for decades to gain the first foothold. Their efforts at national self-determination were put down over and over by declarations of martial law or, failing that, by the military force of the Red Army: 1948 in Czechoslovakia, 1953 in Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1970 and 1980 in Poland.
In the late 1980s, as soon as it became clear that deviations from the Soviet system would no longer be put down by force, the system fell apart. Once Poland was allowed a democratically elected government in 1989, once Hungary opened up the border that summer, the revolutions that followed by the end of the year in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Romania and the regime change in Bulgaria became inevitable. The only other option would have been another military intervention in Hungary as soon as the border was opened. In the end, the hardliners were right - Gorbachev's reforms did lead to the system's demise.
Logically, the declaration of independence by the three Baltic states (also late additions to the Stalinist empire) followed soon after. Here again, the only option would have been massive force.
Once the empire fell, the Soviet Union itself might have been saved except for the actions of the hardliners in staging the anti-Gorbachev coup of 1991. Gorbachev was restored after the popular uprising, but broken altogether, and the final powerlessness of the Moscow government was revealed for all to see. This cleared the way for Yeltsin's seizure of power in Russia and the devolution into the 15 constituent Republics in January 1992.
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* - Hey, let's give credit where it is due: do not forget the MX missile, the "Carter Doctrine," the "Rapid Reaction Force," the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan (prior to the Soviet invasion) and the huge military buildup were all initiated during the last two years of the Carter administration.
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