UprisingsThat message resonates in a country repeatedly wracked by military conflict and still traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The structure of the Soviet Union made its breakup relatively straightforward from a legal standpoint. Unlike the Soviet Union, where half of the citizens were non-Russian, 80 percent of the population of modern-day Russia identifies as Russian. The most important factor preventing bloodshed in 1991 was that Russia didn’t object to dismantling the Soviet Union. In the run-up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and its allies were far from sanguine about the nuclear threat.
