In the twentieth century, and as far as I am aware in all history, there have been only two cases of the overwhelmingly non-violent abandonment of what had been a vast empire: the British and the Soviet/Russian. Of these, the latter was, on the face of it, by far the more surprising. The British Empire had been gravely weakened by the Second World War, which Britain had effectively lost before she was saved by the Soviet Union and the United States. Even before that war broke out, the British Empire in India at least had been badly undermined by Indian nationalism and the ostensibly liberal and democratic ideology of the British people and state. Having lost India--the strategic, economic and emotional core of the Empire--the expensive, irrelevant bits and bobs that remained hardly seemed worth saving, even if Britain had been economically capable of doing so. The Suez debacle cruelly underlined the new realities. In the final steps, imperial retreat was crucially affected by the deep unpopularity in the electorate of using military conscripts for imperial policing duties.
The Soviet Union, by contrast, was not supposedly burdened by a sense of liberal conscience or by democratic pressure from the population. In the common Western analysis of the 1980s--and to a very considerable degree in reality--the population of its empire was thoroughly insulated from subversive ideas by the totalitarian state; for the same reason, the communist ideology, however tarnished in the eyes of East Europeans, continued to hold sway over the population of the Soviet Union itself. The economy, however grotesquely incompetent compared to that of the West, could go on providing living standards that were not only adequate in themselves, but so obviously superior to those of the previous generation as to constitute a source of legitimacy.
