Thirty years ago Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, officially stepped down and dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This happened so suddenly and without warning. None of the Western experts on the Soviet Union saw it coming and even the CIA didn’t receive any information ahead of time.
In the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party, the other socialist camp and a brother to the former Soviet Union, has been studying the causes of the Soviet’s collapse in the hope of avoiding the same fate. But will they be able to stop the tide of history?
