The Disintegration of Empire: Political and Social Dynamics of the Soviet Union’s Collapse - Part IV

Executive Summary

The political and social collapse of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1991 represents one of history’s most consequential institutional dissolutions, driven not by external military defeat but by the simultaneous failure of the regime’s legitimising structures.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s deliberate introduction of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) initiated a cascade of uncontrollable political forces: suppressed nationalist movements emerged across the fifteen republics, ideological exhaustion undermined the Communist Party’s capacity to enforce discipline, ethnic tensions erupted into conflicts across the Caucasus and Baltic regions, and critically, the Russian elite itself defected from the Soviet project under Boris Yeltsin’s leadership.

The August 1991 coup attempt by hardline communists, paradoxically intended to prevent dissolution, instead accelerated it by fatally damaging Gorbachev’s political authority whilst elevating Yeltsin to decisive power. Within months, the three Slavic republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist and replacing it with a loose Commonwealth of Independent States.

This analysis examines the political mechanisms through which a superpower systematically dismantled itself through the intersection of failed reform, elite defection, nationalist mobilisation, and the loss of ideological conviction that had sustained the regime through prior crises.

The evidence demonstrates that the Soviet collapse was fundamentally political rather than merely economic—the consequence of deliberate decisions by political actors operating within collapsing institutional structures rather than the inevitable outcome of impersonal historical forces.

Introduction

The Soviet Union’s dissolution on 26 December 1991 precipitated a fundamental transformation across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and global geopolitics, with consequences that persist into the twenty-first century. Yet the mechanisms underlying this transformation remain inadequately understood.

Western analysis, emphasising economic weakness and ideological superiority, overlooked the political processes through which the regime actually disintegrated: the deliberate introduction of freedom of expression that delegitimised the system it was intended to save, the emergence of suppressed nationalist identities that fragmented the multinational state, the erosion of ideological conviction even among communist elites, and crucially, the defection of the regime’s core constituency—the Russian republic and its political leadership—from the Soviet project itself.

Gorbachev’s reform initiatives were intended as system-preserving measures: controlled liberalisation of economic and political mechanisms designed to reinvigorate socialism whilst maintaining the Communist Party’s ultimate authority. Instead, glasnost and perestroika functioned as system-dissolving mechanisms that unleashed forces the regime proved incapable of containing.

The introduction of public criticism exposed systemic failures with unprecedented clarity. The permission for national movements to organise peacefully created institutional frameworks through which separatist aspirations could be expressed and coordinated.

The loss of ideological conviction amongst the elite removed the final justification for the suppression of alternative political forces. And the emergence of Boris Yeltsin as an alternative power centre, operating from within the Russian republic rather than the discredited Soviet centre, created the political mechanism through which the regime’s dissolution could be accomplished.

Key Political Developments: From Reform to Dissolution

Gorbachev assumed power in March 1985 with a firm conviction that the Soviet system had become moribund due to bureaucratic stagnation and insufficient economic discipline. His initial approach, termed “acceleration,” attempted to revitalise the regime through intensified labour discipline, technological modernisation, and targeted investment. When this proved ineffective—productivity actually declined rather than accelerated during the 1985-1987 period—Gorbachev introduced perestroika (restructuring) in 1987, a more ambitious program of economic and institutional reform.

Perestroika encompassed partial enterprise autonomy, limited introduction of market mechanisms, and crucially, the introduction of contested elections through the mechanism of the Congress of People’s Deputies (instituted in 1989). These changes were intended to mobilise public participation in support of modernisation whilst maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly over ultimate strategic decisions.[britannica]

The companion policy of glasnost represented Gorbachev’s attempt to create sufficient intellectual space for critical discussion of reform requirements without permitting fundamental questioning of the system’s legitimacy. Glasnost was designed as a top-down liberalisation of censorship: permitting discussion of Stalin’s crimes, economic failures, and technological lags that Gorbachev believed required acknowledgment to generate political support for reform. The policy explicitly stopped short of permitting challenges to Marxism-Leninism as an ideological framework, to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, or to nationalist movements seeking to undermine Soviet unity.

Yet the actual consequences of glasnost diverged catastrophically from Gorbachev’s intentions. Once the regime permitted public criticism of specific policies, the logical progression toward criticism of fundamental premises became politically impossible to constrain.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986, initially subject to a three-day cover-up by Soviet authorities, exposed the regime’s capacity for systematic dishonesty precisely when glasnost was supposed to guarantee truthfulness. When radioactive fallout reached Scandinavia and international media reported radiation levels, Soviet authorities were forced to acknowledge the disaster. The disaster’s subsequent coverage in newly liberated Soviet media—investigative journalists reporting on state incompetence, environmental catastrophe, and official lies—demonstrated that glasnost had created institutional spaces the regime no longer controlled.

As media openness advanced in the late 1980s, public discourse shifted from technical critiques of economic performance to fundamental questions about the system’s moral and ideological foundations.

Party newspapers themselves, particularly Pravda, began publishing articles critical of Stalinism, collectivisation, and the command economy model.

By 1988-1989, the boundary between permitted reform discussion and radical system critique had dissolved entirely. Dissident intellectuals like Andrei Sakharov, previously marginalised, gained platforms to articulate comprehensive critiques of Soviet authoritarianism. The Soviet intelligentsia, traditionally the regime’s ideological base, became vocal critics of the system.

The introduction of multi-candidate elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989, intended to create competitive pressure within the party apparatus, instead mobilised political forces external to the party structure.

Democratic elections in the Baltic republics produced overwhelming pro-independence majorities. In the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin was elected to the Congress not from his assigned safe district but from a Moscow constituency after conducting an independent campaign against the official party apparatus. The elite mechanism of democratic centralism—whereby the Communist Party could maintain monolithic unity despite internal discussion—began to disintegrate precisely as it was supposed to adapt to new circumstances.

The Cascade of Nationalism: Glasnost’s Uncontrollable Consequence

The Soviet Union, despite seventy years of Communist internationalism, remained fundamentally a multinational empire comprising fifteen constituent republics with distinct national histories, languages, and grievances.

The Leninist federal structure, established ostensibly to grant national groups autonomy whilst maintaining political unity, had actually subordinated non-Russian nationalities to Russian hegemony disguised through the fiction of federation. Glasnost, by permitting expression of previously suppressed national identities, created institutional opportunity structures through which suppressed nationalism could mobilise into coherent political movements. The process, retrospectively termed the “parade of sovereignties,” commenced in 1988 and accelerated through 1990-1991. Estonia, whose nationalist movement (manifested in the Popular Front) had been organised since the mid-1980s, declared sovereignty in November 1988 and then complete independence on 11 March 1990.

Lithuania followed with its own declaration of independence on 11 March 1990, an act of extraordinary political courage, given that the Soviet authorities responded with an economic blockade (restricting oil and gas supplies) and military occupation. When Soviet paratroopers and military units attacked civilian protesters in Vilnius on 13 January 1991, killing fourteen demonstrators, the action demonstrated that Gorbachev was unwilling to use decisive military force to prevent nationalist movements but equally unwilling to accept their success.

This ambivalence—refusing both apparent suppression and clear accommodation—proved catastrophically destabilising. It signalled to other republics that the centre lacked the coherence to impose either solution, creating a vacuum in which separatist movements could organise.

The parade of sovereignties cascaded and accelerated inexorably.

Latvia declared independence in May 1990. Belarus and Kazakhstan declared sovereignty (short of complete independence) in July and October, respectively. In August 1990, Ukraine—the second-most economically and politically powerful republic—declared sovereignty, a step that Gorbachev recognised as potentially fatal to his project of union renewal. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which possessed the largest population, industrial capacity, and natural resources, declared its own sovereignty on 12 June 1990.

This last development proved decisive: Russia, the largest republic, was asserting that its laws and decisions took priority over the Soviet Union’s central authority.

The critical insight concerns the role of Russian elite defection. Whilst nationalism in non-Russian republics contributed to the USSR’s fragmentation, it was Russian secessionism—the retreat of the dominant nationality from the imperial project—that proved ultimately fatal. Boris Yeltsin, who had risen within the Communist Party apparatus but felt marginalised by Gorbachev, positioned himself as champion of Russian sovereignty against the supposedly oppressive Soviet centre.

This framing was peculiar: Russia, which provided most of the USSR’s leadership, resources, and military force, was to be portrayed as oppressed by a centre that was itself Russian-dominated. Yet Yeltsin’s political genius consisted in articulating Russian concerns that the union’s obligations (subsidising less-developed republics, maintaining military commitments) exceeded Russian benefits, and that Russia would flourish only by withdrawing from the multinational federation.

The “parade of sovereignties” created what was termed the “War of Laws”: escalating legislative conflicts between republics asserting priority of their laws and the Soviet centre claiming overriding authority. The mechanism through which the federation supposedly functioned—democratic centralism and the Communist Party’s hierarchical discipline—had become inoperative. Republics possessed legislatures with genuine, contested elections that increasingly elected officials hostile to Soviet authority. The centre possessed legal authority but lacked enforcement mechanisms to compel obedience from republics that possessed territory, populations, and resources.

Ethnic Tensions and Regional Conflicts: Nationalism’s Violent Dimensions

The nationalism unleashed by glasnost manifested not merely in peaceful independence declarations but in acute ethnic conflicts across the USSR’s multiethnic territories.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Armenian ethnic enclave within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, became the site of escalating violence beginning in 1988. As glasnost permitted the expression of Armenian national identity and Azerbaijani nationalism simultaneously, the region experienced large-scale population transfers and ethnic polarization. Tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia, whilst Armenian populations fled Azerbaijan. By November 1988, half a million demonstrators gathered in Baku’s Lenin Square in response to Azerbaijani ethnic grievances, initiating a process of escalation that would culminate in war following the USSR’s dissolution.

Similar ethnic tensions surfaced across the Caucasus, with South Ossetian separatism within Georgia and Abkhazian separatism within Georgia creating conflicts that would persist into subsequent decades. In the Balkans—though outside the USSR itself—the Soviet Union’s inability to suppress nationalist movements created a demonstrable model that authoritarian federations could fragment violently along ethnic lines.

The failure of Gorbachev’s regime to manage these conflicts—neither suppressing them through the repression of prior decades nor successfully negotiating federal solutions—demonstrated its fundamental loss of coherent authority. Nationalism, once suppressed, could not be resuppressed without abandoning the glasnost project; yet glasnost unleashed centrifugal forces that shattered the federation.

Ideological Exhaustion: The Loss of Faith in the Communist Myth

The fundamental political crisis underlying the USSR’s dissolution was not primarily the economic failure documented in the previous analysis, though economic stagnation contributed substantially to ideological erosion. Instead, it was the collapse of belief in the Communist system’s legitimacy even amongst the regime’s core constituency: the Communist Party elite itself.

By the mid-1980s, high-ranking officials, including Alexander Yakovlev (Gorbachev’s closest intellectual advisor) and Eduard Shevardnadze (Foreign Minister), were privately admitting that the Soviet model had fundamentally failed and was beyond reform within a socialist framework. The KGB, historically the bastion of ideological orthodoxy, was briefing Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could not prevail in the Cold War through military competition alone; the game had shifted to one of ideological and economic competition where the West possessed overwhelming advantages.

This ideological exhaustion distinguished the 1980s crisis from previous periods of economic stagnation. During the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet leaders possessed sufficient ideological conviction to respond to financial difficulties through repression of dissident movements and ideological reaffirmation. The system survived economic stagnation through bureaucratic adaptation and the control of the security apparatus. But by the 1980s, the security apparatus itself lacked ideological conviction to enforce suppression. More fundamentally, the regime’s ruling elite had lost the capacity to articulate a convincing ideological justification for its authority. When Gorbachev proposed glasnost and perestroika, he was already conceding that the system required a fundamental transformation—which, in itself, was an admission of ideological bankruptcy.

The evidence of this ideological erosion accumulated throughout the glasnost period. Party newspapers published articles criticising core tenets of Marxism-Leninism, the command economy, and Stalin’s legacy with increasing radicality. Dissident intellectuals like Andrei Sakharov gained international renown and domestic platforms precisely because the regime could no longer credibly suppress them without contradicting its own glasnost principles. The Soviet intelligentsia—bureaucrats, academics, cultural figures—that had historically provided ideological support for the system shifted to become vocal critics, most notably after the August 1991 coup, when many Party intellectuals defected to Yeltsin’s camp.

The loss of ideological conviction had profound consequences. Without ideological justification, the Communist Party lost its organisational principle. Democratic centralism—whereby the party maintained unity through hierarchical discipline—required party members to keep faith in the party’s supreme wisdom and historical mission.

Once that faith evaporated, the principle became merely the assertion that leadership was correct because it held power, which is not ideology but circular authoritarianism. Party members began asking why they should subordinate their interests to party discipline if the party had no compelling vision. Party cadres in regional positions began calculating whether maintaining Communist Party affiliation remained advantageous, or whether alternative political identities (regional nationalism, democratic reformism, Russian sovereignty) offered better career prospects.

This ideological exhaustion proved decisive in the August 1991 coup attempt. The hardline communists (the “Gang of Eight”) who attempted to prevent the Union Treaty signing did so from the conviction that something must be done to save Soviet socialism. Yet they lacked the ideological persuasiveness to convince the military and security forces to support their action decisively. Military units sent to suppress the anti-coup protests in Moscow received conflicting orders, faced thousands of civilian protesters, and ultimately refused to fire on civilians. The putschists lacked sufficient ideological conviction even within their own institutions to command obedience.

The August 1991 Coup: The Regime’s Final Undoing

On 19 August 1991, hardline Communist leaders launched a coup d’état designed to prevent the signing of the Union Treaty scheduled for later that month. The coup’s instigators—the “State Committee on the State of Emergency” (GKChP), including the Vice President, Defence Minister, KGB chief, and Interior Minister—believed that the treaty would transform the USSR into a loose confederation that would effectively dissolve Soviet state power. They intended to re-establish centralised control, return to orthodox communist ideological positions, and reverse the democratisation and market reforms that they viewed as destroying the Soviet system.

The coup failed dramatically. The plotters detained Gorbachev at his dacha in the Crimea, removing him from political circulation. However, they failed to detain Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected president of the Russian SFSR merely two months earlier (12 June 1990). Yeltsin, rather than attempting to flee or negotiate, travelled to the Russian parliament building (the White House) and organised resistance to the coup. Tens of thousands of Moscow residents gathered spontaneously to defend the parliament building. Military and security units sent to suppress the protests refused to fire on civilians. Within two days, the coup collapsed, and Gorbachev was released and returned to Moscow.

The political consequences proved catastrophic for the regime. Yeltsin, who defied the coup and mobilised popular resistance, emerged as the clear victor politically. Gorbachev, though he returned to power nominally, had been revealed as powerless: Soviet elites had attempted a coup partly because Gorbachev had lost control of events. His return to office did not restore his authority. More fundamentally, the failed coup demonstrated that the regime lacked sufficient internal coherence to enforce obedience even among its highest officials. If the security apparatus, military, and party leadership could not compel soldiers and civilians to obey orders, the regime’s fundamental mechanism of control had evaporated.

Yeltsin moved decisively to consolidate his power in the aftermath. On 24 August, Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party, effectively acknowledging that the party structure could no longer function.

The same day, Yeltsin took control of the Russian Federation's military and security forces. On 29 August, the Communist Party's activities were suspended, a preliminary step toward its complete dissolution. In November 1991, Yeltsin issued a presidential decree outlawing the Communist Party in its entirety, citing the coup attempt as justification. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which had ruled for seventy-four years, effectively ceased to exist within months of the failed coup.

Elite Defection and the Cascade Mechanism

The collapse of the Communist Party and Soviet state proceeded through a mechanism well understood in studies of authoritarian regime breakdown: elite defection cascading from leadership through party cadres and security forces. Once the August coup failed and Yeltsin emerged as the dominant political figure, elite rational calculations shifted fundamentally. Communist Party affiliation, which had been the basis of political and economic access for decades, became a political liability. Regional officials, financial managers, and security force commanders faced incentives to distance themselves from the discredited Soviet centre and seek accommodation with the rising power of the Russian republic and its various regional governments.

The evidence of mass elite defection appears starkly in the dissolution of the Communist Party. Party members, particularly those with alternative power bases (regional leadership positions, business connections, ethnic nationalist followings), began calculating that their interests were better served outside the party structure. Yeltsin’s ban on the Communist Party in November 1991 was not a repudiation of a powerful institution but rather the formal acknowledgment of an institution that had already dissolved through internal defection. Party cadres who had operated within the Democratic Centralism system for decades suddenly discovered that alternative political identities—democratic reformist, regional nationalist, Russian sovereigntist—offered superior political prospects.

This elite defection process manifested most clearly in the behaviour of republican leaders. Gorbachev had attempted to negotiate a new Union Treaty that would strengthen federalism while maintaining Soviet sovereignty. The republics, in the early stages of the parade of sovereignties, sought expanded autonomy within a reformed union. However, as the centre’s weakness became apparent—demonstrated by the Vilnius massacre failing to suppress Lithuanian independence, the failed August coup signalling the regime’s inability to cohere its own leadership—republican leaders began calculating that complete independence offered superior prospects to either the Soviet centre or even a reformed federation. The logic was straightforward: why negotiate with a weakening centre when one could declare independence and establish facts on the ground?

The Belavezha Accords: The Final Dissolution

By December 1991, the parade of sovereignties had reached its conclusion. All fifteen Soviet republics had either declared independence or asserted sovereignty incompatible with the Soviet Union's continued existence. The Central Asian republics, which had initially favoured a reformed union due to economic interdependence with Russia, shifted toward independence as alternatives became inevitable.

Kazakhstan, the last republic to declare sovereignty, nonetheless recognised that the Soviet centre had dissolved beyond recovery.

The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred through the Belavezha Accords, signed on 8 December 1991 at a hunting lodge in Belarus.

The agreement was signed by three leaders: Boris Yeltsin (Russia), Leonid Kravchuk (Ukraine), and Stanislav Shushkevich (Belarus). These three republics, which together had signed the 1922 treaty creating the USSR, now signed an agreement declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and would be replaced by a loose Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) without centralised authority or supranational institutions.

Ukraine’s participation proved critical. As the second-most powerful Soviet republic, economically and politically, Ukraine’s secession made the continued existence of the Soviet Union impossible. Gorbachev’s attempts to negotiate a union of sovereign states, or a confederation preserving some Soviet institutional structures, depended fundamentally on maintaining Ukraine within the framework. Once Ukraine seceded, the Soviet project became arithmetically impossible: Russia plus Kazakhstan plus selected Central Asian republics might constitute a state entity, but without Ukraine, Belarus, and the Caucasus, the USSR ceased to be the multinational empire it had been.

On 26 December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.

The following day, Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR—a position that effectively no longer existed—and transferred his authority to Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation.

The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin, and the Russian tricolour raised in its place. The institutional dissolution that had proceeded through cascading elite defections, failed coups, and declarations of republic independence reached formal completion.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis: The Mechanisms of Regime Disintegration

The Soviet Union’s dissolution proceeded through a cascade mechanism in which each political decision created conditions for subsequent decisions that inexorably progressed toward complete disintegration. Gorbachev’s initial decision to introduce glasnost (intended as controlled liberalisation supporting reform) created uncontrollable spaces for political speech that inevitably led toward ideological critique. This critique exposed the regime’s loss of ideological conviction, which undermined the Communist Party’s capacity to enforce discipline. The loss of party discipline, combined with the introduction of contested elections, created institutional forums within which anti-Soviet forces could organise.

Nationalist movements, previously suppressed, mobilised within these forums and began demanding independence. As nationalist movements grew, the regime faced the choice between repression (abandoning glasnost) or accommodation (permitting secession). Gorbachev selected a middle path—refusing both clear repression and clear accommodation—which merely demonstrated that the centre lacked coherent authority.

Russian elite defection, led by Yeltsin, proved the final element of the cascade. Rather than attempting to preserve the Soviet centre, Yeltsin mobilised Russian regional nationalism against the discredited Soviet structure.

The August 1991 coup attempt, intended to reverse this trajectory through the reassertion of military-communist orthodoxy, instead accelerated it by demonstrating the regime’s inability to enforce obedience even among its own elite. Once the coup failed, the momentum became irreversible. Elite defection cascaded through party cadres and regional officials. Republics recognised that independence was achievable and that negotiating with a weakening centre offered inferior prospects to unilateral declaration of independence. The Belavezha Accords formalised a dissolution process that had already become inevitable through these cascading decisions and defections.

The critical mechanism distinguishing the Soviet collapse from mere economic failure was political: the regime’s loss of coherent authority to enforce obedience, combined with the emergence of alternative power centres (Yeltsin, nationalist movements, regional governments) that could mobilise populations toward alternative political visions.

The Soviet Union possessed substantial military and economic resources even in 1991; had the regime possessed sufficient internal coherence and ideological conviction, these resources might have been deployed to suppress secession.

The fact that suppression did not occur reflects not resource constraints but political choice: the elites that controlled the suppressive apparatus lacked conviction in the Soviet project’s worth.

Conclusion

The Lessons of Political Disintegration

The Soviet Union’s collapse between 1985 and 1991 demonstrates that superpower status, vast military capacity, and global geopolitical position provide no immunity against political disintegration when the regime’s legitimising structures have eroded.

The USSR possessed the world’s second-largest economy, a military establishment that had achieved rough parity with the United States, and a sophisticated state apparatus that had endured through prior crises, including invasion, civil war, famine, and significant economic disruptions. Yet all these material attributes proved insufficient once the regime’s ideological foundation had evaporated and its elite became unwilling to enforce authority.

Gorbachev’s fatal decision was not the introduction of glasnost and perestroika per se, but rather his failure to recognise that these reforms, once initiated, would generate forces beyond regime control.

The introduction of freedom of expression inevitably leads to criticism of fundamental system premises once initial critiques of specific failures have generated political space. The introduction of contested elections inevitably mobilises political forces external to the party apparatus once genuine electoral competition becomes possible.

The permitting of national movements to organise inevitably leads toward nationalist politics once suppression is renounced. Each of these dynamics was entirely foreseeable; Gorbachev’s error was believing that reform could be controlled, that glasnost could serve system preservation, and that perestroika could selectively modernise institutions whilst maintaining essential power relationships.

Yet the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse was not Gorbachev’s miscalculation but rather the regime's genuine ideological lack of conviction by the 1980s. Had the Communist elite been convinced of socialism’s historical inevitability, they would have been willing to endure economic difficulties while suppressing nationalist and democratic challenges.

The 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that authoritarian communist regimes could manage economic stagnation through repression. What the 1980s revealed was that such repression became possible only if the regime’s elites actually believed in the system’s legitimacy. Once that belief evaporated, repression became merely violence without ideological justification, and elites began calculating whether maintaining the system served their personal interests.

The loss of ideological conviction was manifested most clearly in elite defection: party officials abandoning Communist Party affiliation when alternative power bases became available; security force commanders refusing to fire on civilians; military officers questioning the coup attempt’s justification. This elite-level disintegration of conviction preceded and enabled the popular mobilisation of nationalism and democratic movements that most historical accounts emphasise.

The “people” did not overthrow the Soviet system; instead, the system’s own elite, losing faith in it, ceased to maintain it. The people seized the opportunity this elite breakdown created to express suppressed national identities and democratic aspirations.

For contemporary political systems, the lesson is decisive: legitimacy cannot be indefinitely sustained through material resources or coercive capacity alone. Regimes require either genuine ideological conviction amongst their elites or the belief amongst subject populations that alternatives to current arrangements are worse than current conditions. Once both conditions erode, the elite loses conviction whilst populations believe that alternative arrangements might genuinely be superior—regime collapse becomes possible despite material resources that initially appear sufficient to prevent it.

The Soviet Union’s collapse was not the result of external defeat, internal revolution, or overwhelming economic crisis, but instead the simultaneous erosion of elite conviction and the emergence of politically viable alternatives through which elites could pursue their interests without maintaining the system.