Yeltsin«s Advisor from the U.S. Named Key Factors in the Collapse of the USSR 0 17

American economist and former advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin Jeffrey Sachs named the key factors in the collapse of the USSR. He discussed this in an interview with the head of the Russian Historical Society Ruslan Gagkuyev.

According to him, the collapse of the Soviet Union was caused by perestroika, glasnost, low oil prices, a debt crisis, and the Chernobyl disaster. He also mentioned "covert Western operations" and the fact that Pope John Paul II was an unofficial leader of the anti-communist movement in his native Poland.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was not widely anticipated. Of course, there were isolated voices in the West predicting that ethnic tensions in the USSR would lead to its breakup. The CIA was working to undermine the Soviet Union, but not very successfully. Everything happened due to a confluence of circumstances," the economist noted.