Foreign Policy Change and State Stability

States are rarely expected to collapse. At the time, nobody could quite believe their eyes when the USSR underwent what appeared to be an involuntary self-immolation. Since then, it has been hard to see the fall as anything but inevitable. Lenin was well aware of the contingency of the Russian Revolution, noting that, in 1917, had the Bolsheviks tried to seize power three days earlier or three days later they would have failed. Most historians recognise just how precarious the group’s seizure of power was and how effective and ruthless the Bolshevik consolidation needed to be. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, appears to many not to have been contingent, so much as almost preordained.