system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does a government like the Soviet Union just collapse? What does that actually look like?

I am having a hard time understanding how governments can just "collapse" like the Soviet Union, without any foreign threats. Wouldn't an incompetent and dysfunctional government just keep up appearances and continue to operate in the background?
gpt
The Soviet government was set up *somewhat* similarly to the US in that the country was organized into a bunch of semi-autonomous states under a national government.

The Soviet system differed from the US system in that the national Soviet government was much stronger than the US Federal government is.  None of the "states" in the Soviet Union actually wanted to be a part of it - the only reason they stayed in is because the national government threatened to militarily intervene if they didn't carry out national policy.  

The Soviet economy was centrally planned which meant that as it began to break down the states couldn't really do anything to fix the problems that were occurring.  

Take Georgia, as an example.  Georgia was heavily industrialized but had no national resources.  Running its factories required it to import raw materials from the Central Asian Soviet states.  When the Soviet economy began to collapse those imports stopped coming in.  In a market economy that generally isn't a big deal, because you can just buy raw materials from somewhere else.  But that wasn't possible in the Soviet system - the national government only allowed Georgian factories to use raw materials coming from Central Asia and it relied on the local Georgian state government to enforce that.

That's not a popular policy when there are literally no imports coming in from Central Asia and everyone is out of work as a result.  This added pressure to the Georgian state government, which already didn't really want to be a part of the Soviet Union, to split off so that it would no longer be subject to the national government's economic planning scheme.

Starting in 1988 the situation began to get so bad that there were massive protests throughout the country and state level governments began ignoring national directives.  Initially the national government used the military to suppress this, but it quickly became clear that wasn't working.  

The national government then held local elections in 1990 as a way to try to pacify the states.  Those elections resulted in pro-independence governments being elected in every single state and, rather than militarily intervene again, the national government elected to disband itself.  The process of disbanding was somewhat straight forward because the pre-existing state governments were able to take over and function as national governments for all of the new countries that came into existence.