Hello all, how inevitable was the fall of the wall and disintegration of the USSR from the west's eyes? (Sources would be nice for further reading) - thanks!
Let us be careful about citing Andrei Amalrik as /u/FuckThePhalanx has done in this analysis, as Amalrik had no effect on Soviet studies at the time, and scholars have tended to dismiss Amalrik's prediction even after the fall of the Soviet Union as "lucky," even if his "Will the Soviet Union Survive 1984?" represented a meaningful critique of Soviet politics (after all, Amalrik was a Soviet dissident who spent time in jail and whose work also predicted that the Soviet Union would go to war with China).
The consensus among historians is solid on this one: mainstream analysts in the West failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union (indeed, in the field of diplomatic history--my field--we often joke about certain political science articles published just before the collapse of the Soviet Union predicting that the Soviet Union thrive for the foreseeable future, and if you really want, I can follow the rules of the subreddit and look one up for you). The diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis summarizes this phenomenon beginning on page 238 of his popular The Cold War: A New History (2005). Despite the many problems inherit in the Soviet system, Gaddis notes,
the upheavals of 1989, like those of 1789, caught everyone by surprise. Historians could of course look back, after the fact, and specify the causes [here he lists some common arguments]. Sensing these trends, the great actor-leaders of the 1980s had found ways to dramatize them to make the point that the Cold War need not last forever. Not even they, however, foresaw how soon and how decisively it would end.
This is an open-and-shut analysis: no, the West did not predict the fall of the Soviet Union. Not even close.
Good question. Andrei Amalrik was a Russian writer who published "Will the Soviet Union survive 1984?", an essay predicting the eventual fall of the Soviet Union due to social and racial/ethnic woes, as well as raising tensions between the USSR and China. He predicts that it would fall in 1984 (the essay was published in 1970), and would dissolve into a state led by extremists, fall into utter anarchy, or transition into a peaceful state like that of the UK. While these predictions were a little off, he was more or less correct about falling due to a myriad of social woes.
We all know now that the USSR had some serious issues. What's interesting, however, is that nearly all of US (and Western) academics disregarded this essay as false. Most said that it was an interesting look into failures of the USSR by a citizen of the USSR, but aside from that it wasn't really a piece of political foresight to be taken as a true prediction.