The Gorbachev-era earthquake that led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet state was due in significant part to autonomous changes in Soviet civil society, changes that were in some respects no different from the type of social evolution going on in other regions and countries with no experience of totalitarianism. The failure of a large section of the Sovietological community to perceive these underlying changes accounts in some measure for their blindness in not being able to anticipate the coming revolution.
