the empire never fails to fail in any promise that i makes, and the trouble that creates is larger than you might imagine;

Where did all the time go?  Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell.  Then Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite.  It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle of our times.

The once mighty Soviet Union had become exhausted by its long military/economic/political struggle to keep up with the much wealthier United States and its rich allies.  Moscow had 40,000 tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an empty shell.

A senior KGB general in Moscow told me that, a decade earlier, the renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had warned the Politburo that failure by Soviet industry to account for deprecation to modernize and replace outdated equipment would provoke a major crisis by 1990.  This is exactly what happened..........https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/eric-margolis/how-we-betrayed-russia/