I approach the history of the Soviet collapse with the basic premise that imperial rule is incompatible with electoral democracy and that the conflict between them led to the fall of the world’s last empire. Once Gorbachev introduced elements of electoral democracy into Soviet politics in 1989, the newly elected politicians in Russia were suddenly empowered to say whether they were willing to continue bearing the burdens of empire, while the politicians in the non-Russian republics faced the question of whether they wanted to remain under imperial rule. Eventually, both groups answered in the
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