On August 19, 1991, Soviet hardliners launched a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Within three days, the coup had failed; within four months, the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. The collapse of one of the two superpower states of the twentieth century — across approximately four months from coup attempt to dissolution — was not predicted by any of the major Western intelligence services with substantial budgets, decades of accumulated expertise, and dedicated Soviet analysts.

The CIA's Soviet Bloc analysis as of mid-1991 generally treated the USSR as a continuing strategic adversary; the Pentagon's force-planning frameworks generally assumed continuing Soviet capability; the diplomatic establishments of major Western states had no contingency plans for the dissolution that occurred. The cumulative miss was not the result of insufficient effort, insufficient information, or insufficient analytical talent. It was the result of a regime change in the underlying conditions — the structural facts about Soviet political-economic viability had been shifting in ways that the historical reference classes did not capture, and the specific events that produced the dissolution (coup attempt, public response, republic-by-republic declarations of independence, December 1991 dissolution) were a sequence of contingent decisions whose cumulative outcome was genuinely novel.