There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would dissolve 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 Americans, particularly conservatives, view Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative as not only predicting but causing the dissolution of the Soviet state.
Whether any particular prediction was correct is still a matter of debate, since they give different reasons and different time frames for the Soviet collapse.
Conventional wisdom discounting a collapse
U.S. analysts
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.
In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.
The Central Intelligence Agency also badly over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union, and did not anticipate the speed of its collapse. Former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, "We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem."
In a symposium launched to review Michel Garder's French book: L'Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which also predicted the collapse of the USSR, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garder's book as "the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism." He warns that "great revolutions are most infrequent and that successful political systems are tenacious and adaptive." In addition, the reviewer of the book, Michael Tatu, disapproved of the "apocalyptic character" of such a forecast and is almost apologetic for treating it seriously.
Predictions of dissolution or collapse
Analysts, organizations and politicians who predicted that the Soviet Union would one day cease to exist included:
Ludwig von Mises
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued in his 1922 book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis that the Soviet system would eventually cease to exist. This book was published months before Lenin implemented the New Economic Policy reintroducing partial private property in agriculture. Mises' analysis was based on the economic calculation problem, a critique of central planning first outlined in 1920 journal articles. His argument was that the Soviet Union would find itself increasingly unable to set correct prices for the goods and services it produced:
We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely on the preceding age of capitalism [for the purpose of determining prices]. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1989 derive from knowledge of the prices of 1949?
Leon Trotsky
One of the founders of the USSR, later expelled by Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky devoted much of his time in exile to the question of the Soviet Union's future. In time, he came to believe that a new revolution was necessary to depose the nomenklatura and reinstate working class rule as the first step to socialism. In 1936 he made the following prediction:
World War II
In 1941 Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany decided to attack the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht and other Axis military forces invaded the Soviet Union, and the Red Army retreated.