The fall of the USSR was a tragedy for humanity, but not the end of history On 26 December 1991, when the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time, the world did not merely witness the dissolution of a state. It witnessed the victory of counterrevolution—the temporary triumph of capitalism over the most advanced historical attempt to abolish exploitation and class rule. The fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not the end of an experiment that had “failed,” as bourgeois ideology insists. It was one of the greatest tragedies in human history precisely because it interrupted a process that had transformed the lives of hundreds of millions and reshaped the global balance of class forces. For most of the twentieth century, the USSR stood as living proof that capitalism was neither eternal nor inevitable. It abolished unemployment, guaranteed universal education and healthcare, eliminated illiteracy, industrialized vast regions in record time, defeated fascism at a staggering human cost, and inspired revolutionary movements across every continent. Its existence alone constrained imperialism, strengthened workers’ struggles worldwide, and gave material meaning to the idea that another social system was possible. The counterrevolution of 1991 therefore marked far more than a geopolitical realignment. It signaled the restoration of capitalist power, the privatization of social wealth created by generations of workers, and the descent of millions into poverty, insecurity, and social degradation. Life expectancy collapsed, inequality exploded, and the promise of socialist modernity was replaced by oligarchic plunder. The tragedy was real, measurable, and lived. Yet to understand 1991, one must resist the convenient fiction that everything unraveled suddenly in the late 1980s. The counterrevolution was not an accident, nor merely the result of external pressure from imperialism. It was the outcome of a long process of ideological retreat and structural erosion within socialism itself.
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