The Soviet Union was first headless in 1975. After Brezhnev's stroke, he was no longer fit to govern. The people in the back room — mostly Yuri Andropov, the he

The Soviet Union was first headless in 1975. After Brezhnev's stroke, he was no longer fit to govern. The people in the back room — mostly Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB — ran the country by favor-trading and bumbled their way into Afghanistan. But the mistakes started earlier. The arrest of Khrushchev in 1964 may already have been the point of no return. When you are faking the procedure, at least you retain some possibility of belief in democratic — or at least bureaucratic — principles. But when you just arrest the leader one day, the illusion is broken. Nobody can really believe you anymore. The Five-Year Plan of 1965-70 — the Kosygin reform — was a success by almost all conventional economic measures [1]. Growth improved, innovation occurred, wages went up. But it was reversed. Some people in the party didn't believe that it was Marxist enough. Brezhnev, having come into office how he did, could never have had the courage to demand some kind of pragmatism that could have led the Soviet Union to the transformation that China underwent just a few years later. A nation can't be run like a mob, with everyone looking over their shoulder to see if they're going to be taken outside next. It paralyzes decision-making. So when Brezhnev had a stroke and could barely even perform the superficial functions of leadership, nobody even wanted the job. Surely, if Khrushchev could be ousted from his position for his drunkenness, Brezhnev's incapacity should have been more than sufficient. Andropov, the leader of the KGB, was effectively calling the shots at that point, and when Leonid finally kicked the bucket in 1982, it was indeed Andropov who took over. But isn't it telling that for seven years, Andropov could have easily become the leader of the world's second-largest economy and simply didn't want to? What does that say about his confidence in the system he was running? By the time Gorbachev was in the chair there just wasn't anything left to save. You can't have a vanguard-party government without a functioning vanguard party. The multi-party systems have all proven more resilient because when one of the parties starts to malfunction, it is removed from power and has the opportunity to reinvent itself or be replaced. No single-party state has lasted longer than China's current run, which is also starting to show a few cracks. So far the two-party system in the United States has avoided the notionally unlikely situation that both parties become highly dysfunctional at the same time. But I don't like the news these days. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform