The economic reasons of collapse of Soviet Union are very popular in the West, yet to say that 1990 was the worst time for SU in purely economic terms is not tr

The economic reasons of collapse of Soviet Union are very popular in the West, yet to say that 1990 was the worst time for SU in purely economic terms is not true. Soviet Union was in a disastrous state in 1920's, in late 1940's after the war, yet it didn't collapse. The collapse of Soviet Union was simply a dissolution of union treaty between soviet republics, that happened primarily as a result of a struggle for power between Union-level government (Gorbachev) and republican-level (Eltsin of Russia, Kravchuk of Ukraine, etc). After failed coup in August of 1991 Gorbachev effectively lost his support and the fate of SU was sealed. Again, economic crisis in the 90's in many of the post-soviet states was much stronger yet none of them 'collapsed'. Regime changes often have political reasons, where economy plays a useful backdrop.