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Amalric outlines a chilling, decade-long scenario of dissolution. Disorder is already evident in "an unusual spread of casual robbery." Having discarded the old Christian morality, the Kremlin is desperately trying to substitute nationalism, with its "inherent cult of force and expansionist ambitions." Already, there have been clashes with China along the Ussuri River in the East.
Amalric predicts that China will launch a war with Russia "somewhere between 1975 and 1980"—as soon as Peking has amassed a credible nuclear stockpile. The Soviets, Amalric's script continues, will look to Washington for help. But the U.S., Amalric says, will already have established some sort of modus vivendi with Peking. The war will be long and demoralizing. Moscow will have to withdraw troops from Europe, leading to the "desovietization" of the East Bloc.
Isolated abroad and at home, the Kremlin will have to send troops to put down riots in Russian cities, thus "hastening the collapse of the army." Eventually, one final jolt—a battlefield defeat, a disturbance in Moscow—will topple the regime.
What then? Remnants of the middle class, if powerful enough, might be able to stitch together a loose federation, something like the British Commonwealth, out of some of the Soviet republics. But in Central Asia, Amalric writes, there would probably remain a lone state that would regard itself as "the U.S.S.R.'s successor." It would integrate "traditional Communist ideology with the features of Oriental despotism."
Fanciful though Amalric's thesis may seem, there are serious students who accept all or part of it. Most observers, however, would be stunned if the U.S.S.R. were to collapse in the foreseeable future—much less within 15 years, and in the manner foreseen by Amalric. While he need not be taken literally as a political prophet, he does illuminate most of the problems that plague the country. The value of his work is to point out that Russia could undergo some dramatic changes as it seeks to cope with those problems.