Russia: Canada with Testosterone

The Soviet Union was weakened by many developments, including important political ones, but it ultimately collapsed because it ran out of money. The costs of giving the military first call on every sector of the economy, of controlling one empire in Eastern Europe and another in Central Asia, of maintaining incompetent allies from Cuba to Angola, of fighting proxy wars in Vietnam and Ethiopia and a direct war in Afghanistan, and of pouring more and more money into more and more inefficient state enterprises at home amounted to one of history's most dramatic cases of imperial overstretch.

The political costs of running out of money and having to retract proved far greater for the Soviet Union than they would have been for an ordinary country, because the Russian empire and the Soviet Union defined themselves, drew their identity from, the majesty of an ever expanding empire. Without this identity, Russia didn't know what it stood for, who its people were, or what its boundaries should be.