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This claim was made by Foreign Policy in 2011:
In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union
I was wondering if the above claim is true. Would the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 have been a huge surprise to Western intellectuals and politicians in, say, 1985 (before Gorbachev)?
In 1976, Emmanuel Todd published La Chute finale.
The book states that the Soviet Union had been stagnating since 1970 and that its economy was collapsing (its main novelty, which made it justly famous, is the use of demographic indicators, and especially infant mortality, to pierce through the obfuscations of Soviet statistics). It predicts the decomposition of the Soviet sphere in 10 to 20 years because of the centripetal forces exercised on the politically dominated european periphery of the Soviet sphere by a new generation of educated individuals well-aware of the much higher standards of living in Western Europe (the precise mechanism described, involving economic stagnation, then ideological decomposition and finally the decomposition of the state system is well-worth reading).
The book was well-received and was a publishing success. It favorably cites Amalrik's work in numerous occasions and in fact claims multiple times that its core thesis, though controversial, is not at all uncommon in the West, so that in addition to providing a clear example of a prediction of the final dislocation of the USSR in a timeframe and manner reasonably close to actual events, it is also a testimony of the fact that many people in the late 70s had come to the conclusion that the USSR would collapse within one or two decades.
There is a once famous book written in 1970 by Andrei Amalrik, titled "Will Soviet Union survive until 1984?"
English edition: Harper and Row, NY, 1970.
(I don't think it was ever published in Russian. The author is an emigrant from Soviet Union).
The date of his prediction is slightly incorrect, but in 1970s this was a very unusual prediction, people did not believe him. The details and reasons of collapse that he describes are all wrong.
When it actually collapsed, I tried to find whether there is any published text of 1970s or 1980s which predicted this, and I found none, except this book. Neither I could find any convincing explanation of reasons of this collapse. Why China does not collapse? I lived in Soviet Union, and talked to many people. Nobody could see this before 1989.
Pemark. The other answer mentions decline of oil production. This does not logically imply a dissolution of Soviet Union. (Cuba and N Korea have little oil, but they still exist). Decline of revenues from export may mean an economic crisis. But I believe that dissolution of Soviet Union had other reasons. Most countries which experience economic difficulties do not fall apart as a result.
M. King Hubbert predicted that Soviet oil production would decline as it did, thus implying an economic collapse.
It seems that the CIA took Hubbert’s methodology seriously and applied it to the USSR (Anonymous 1977). This report predicted that Soviet oil production would peak in the early 1980's. In fact there were two peaks, the first in 1983, at 12.5 million barrels per day and the second in 1988 at 12.6 barrels per day. Since then production has declined steadily. It seems likely that the Reagan administration, which took office in 1981, bearing in mind the economic havoc produced when US production peaked in 1981, followed by the Arab oil embargo and the "oil crisis" of 1973-74 and the deep recession that followed, decided to use the "oil weapon" to destabilize the USSR. Reagan embarked on a major military buildup, putting the Soviet Union under pressure to keep up. Meanwhile, declining prices after 1981 forced the USSR to pump more oil to supply its clients in Eastern Europe and to sell in world markets for hard currency. Then in 1985 Regan persuaded Saudi Arabia to flood the world markets with cheap oil. Again, the USSR had to increase output to earn hard currency. This led to the second peak in 1988. Two years later the USSR imploded (Heinberg 2004) pp 40-41.
The same methodology could be applied to predict the collapse of the Shah's government, the 1970s stagflation in the US, and the fate of oil producers in general. Hubbert published his method in 1956.
In his book „The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century“, Zbigniew Brzeziński, National Security Advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, refers to several own predictions about the collapse of Communism in general and the „Soviet Union“ project in particular.
The earliest reference is to his master's thesis of 1950 (I could not find the references on the Web). In his newer predictions of late 1980's, he suggested five possibilities:
As we know, in 1989-1991 the collapse took place, gradually changing into the KGB coup in 1999-2000.
So, the direct answer to your question would be,
Certainly, it was not a surprise for officials.
However, the topic was not very popular in media, so it may become a surprise to average citizens in the West.
Further reading:
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, probably the greatest French writer on the history of the USSR predicted the fall of the USSR in her book "L'empire éclaté" in 1978. She thought it would fall because of the faster growing demography of the Muslim republics of Central Asia (the soviet "stans").
I'd argue that Ronald Reagan, or someone in his administration or amongst his influencers did.
Whether one might like the character or not, methinks he deserves credit for great Soviet Russia jokes and for having reversed the policy of deescalation of his predecessors. He basically smashed the accelerator to the floor and proceeded to militarily outspend the USSR to death. It ended up very costly for the US but by 1985 the Soviet Union was spending 25% of its GDP on its military - which is completely unsustainable, and indeed led it to its collapse a few years later.
In this sense one could argue that his contribution to ending the Cold War was quite significant, if not key, and I can't imagine him moving forward with this without at least some of his surroundings or influencers thinking - or outright predicting - it might work.
