Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union

There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would fall before the eventual dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Authors often credited with having predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union include Andrei Amalrik in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere) (1976), economist Ravi Batra in his 1978 book The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism and French historian Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Additionally, Walter Laqueur notes that "Various articles that appeared in professional journals such as Problems of Communism and Survey dealt with the decay and the possible downfall of the Soviet regime." Some US conservatives view Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative as not only predicting but causing the dissolution of the USSR.

Whether any particular prediction was correct is still a matter of debate, since they give differing reasons for the Soviet collapse.

Predictions of the Soviet Union's impending demise were discounted by many Western academic specialists, and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology. For example, Amalrik's book "was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West" but "virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction." Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike.

...
Wikipedia