The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo

old debates in your mind. What was it that
     in the end did him in? The politeness? The urgency? Both? At home I have a photograph of him that I once asked him to sign.
     It shows him, hat in hand and bundled in an overcoat, standing calf-deep in snow in a barren pine forest near his house. You
     can see the footprints in the snow that lead to where he stands. The immensity of the forest makes him appear small and human,
     a scale that is unusual for him, a man usually presented as so much larger. Still, he looks comfortable in this awkward position.
     He was always that: a man who could deal gracefully with the uncomfortable. The portrait of him alone in the snow tells a
     great deal.
    We are sitting quietly now, the easy topics exhausted — his health, recent travels, what we have read and are thinking about.
     I recall our last meeting; he discusses his decision to slow down his travels. But these are small matters. I have sat with
     him before, but one question, the one I most want to ask, I have never raised directly. I have read what he has written on
     the subject, pages of justifications and explanations. How even to ask it? What causes a nation to crumble? What does it feel
     like to have 250 million lives and hopes run through your fingers like so much wheat? I take a sip of tea, look at him directly.
     I ask: “As you look back on it now, why did it unravel?” He shifts in his chair, rubs his hand across his face, fingers his
     water glass, and smiles. Then, slowly, Mikhail Gorbachev begins his answer.
2. Failure to Crystallize
    The end of the Soviet Union was one of those sandpile avalanches that, like the 1929 stock market collapse, demanded a complete
     remapping of the world. Its collapse was a permanent modification to the landscape of power. At the time, the Soviet Union
     was one of two centers of global power. The country’s scientists and engineers were among the best on earth; its artists and
     musicians were celebrated overseas; its military was the closest match on the planet for the forces of the United States.
     The USSR put men and women in space, gave billions in aid to other countries, had a philosophy of politics and a dream of
     society that had seduced men as different as Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. And then, in a historical instant, the whole
     ornate system was simply gone. It was, in short, Per Bak in Red Square.
    The Cold War had to end someday, of course. But how? Nuclear holocaust? Truce? And when? These questions had been pondered
     at the cost of billions of dollars. They had underpinned the careers of generals, spies, economists, and diplomats, consumed
     entire lifetimes in hurried conferences, secret briefings, cables and photos and leaks scrutinized for meaningful hints. In
     a rather pointed “ahem” directed at his own profession, the Yale historian and political scientist John Lewis Gaddis once
     observed that the end of the Cold War “was of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming
     both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming. None actually did so, though.” And it wasn’t just the Ph.D.s
     who missed the clues. All those generals, all those spies, all those diplomats — they were just as blind.
    Why, twenty years after the USSR split open in front of its astonished audience like some clever magic trick, do we really
     care what happened? Isn’t it enough to have seen the trick at work, to have watched how, under some sort of historical pressure,
     the collective apparatus that ordered the lives of millions simply sighed, split, died, and baffled the experts? Maybe. But
     the collapse of the USSR is useful for us too as a study of how the wrong way of seeing can hide the real dynamics of the
     world, why the end of the USSR stunned the same minds who would later be stunned by 9/11 or the financial collapse of 2008
     and who, I assure you, will be stunned again before long. The USSR was — as Gorbachev