The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

Outside of the military realm, Russia simply could not keep up with the technological dynamism of the American-led world. As the years stacked up into decades, the Soviet economy plateaued in terms of sophistication, and nearly all economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t from technology or productivity, but instead from an expansion of the working-age population. More inputs, more outputs. To believe the Soviet Union would continue to function over the long haul, you had to believe that the Soviet population would continue growing, and that just wasn’t in the cards. Between devastation in the world wars, Stalin’s tender urbanization and collectivization efforts, broad-scale mismanagement under Khrushchev, and organizational stagnation under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union stopped generating sufficient numbers of new workers. By 1980 the demographic pipeline was already running dry . . . and then the bottom fell out. The trauma of the Soviet collapse was economic, cultural, political, strategic—and demographic. Between 1986 and 1994, the birth rate halved while the death rate nearly doubled. Russia today is deindustrializing at the same time its population is collapsing.