The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a pivotal political event of the 20th century that signaled the eclipse of a major political and economic ideology of the 20th century, i.e., Communism, and left the United States as the sole and unchallenged superpower in the world. Most political analysts and historians were taken by surprise by the seemingly sudden and unexpected collapse but were quick to propose the reasons for the failure, as it is always easy to find causes for an event in hindsight. In this paper, I shall discuss just three of the most important causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
             A number of people, particularly the ones who are firmly opposed to Marxism, argue that the Soviet "experiment" was doomed to fail from the start. They consider the Communist ideology-the very basis of the formation of the Soviet Empire-as inherently flawed. Hence an imminent collapse of the Soviet Union was predicted by a number of Western writers since long ago who believed that it was only a matter of time before the contradictions of an "unnatural" system caught up with it. To them the collapse of the Soviet Union was no surprise; the real surprise was how it survived for such a long period of about three-quarters of a century, i.e., from 1917 to 1991. For example, George F. Kennan, the American diplomat who proposed the American foreign policy doctrine of "containment" after the Second World War, believed that "...Soviet power...bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced." (Kennan, 1947) Hence, he promised that if the USSR were not allowed to expand through a policy of containment, it would soon collapse. Similarly, historian Martin Malia1 proposed a theory that the utopian Soviet dream of building a "maximalist" socialist society of equality and abundance was 'fatally flawed' and flew in the face of all historical precedent as well as human nature; it was, therefore, ".......