re: Why did the soviet union collapse?

A nation with barely a first world military with a barely functioning 2nd world economy.

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Given what I see and hear now from Putin’s Russia, I wonder whether it was a real collapse or merely a Soviet costume change into Act 2/plan B scenario.

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The Soviet Union was very different.

It was a revolutionary power, that felt it had a moral obligation to support communism everywhere. And overthrow the existing order. It also suppressed Russian nationalism, and promoted ethnic minorities at the expense of Russians. It was also an atheist state.

Russia is a nationalist state, where the culture is driven by Christian and ethnic Russian norms. The state sees the Church as a pillar of stability and a tool to promote healthy social norms. Russia also seeks stability, and has an inherently conservative foreign policy. It tries to stabilize the world, it isn’t interested in supporting foreign revolutions. Change is dangerous, in their mind.

China allows private property, USSR didn't.

Of course, Deng is the one who began to move China forward China would've wound up like USSR if it had stayed on Mao's path.

In spite of some economic help from the West.

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II.

Western greed and corruption.

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First and foremost, at the point of their seeming collapse, the USSR was still Russia, and they were a totalitarian state

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No... Russian nationalism (Russian chauvinism) was suppressed. Ethnic and regional minorities were also given preference over Russians. And the Russian SSR was used to subsidize the other states.

The Revolution was really led by the havenots of the Russian Empire. People who existed at the margins of society, and didn’t necessarily like Russia.

It’s not surprising these people generally weren’t Russians. And so had everything to gain by suppressing the Russians. So you had Poles, Georgians, the occasional Ukrainian, and a lot of secular Jews. More than half of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish.

It was parasitic.

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From a foreign policy perspective it’s an important distinction. Because Russia is very conservative, whereas the USSR was sponsoring revolutions all over the globe, and truly embraced Trotskys concept of a constant and permanent war.

Oh absolutely, Washington and the American oligarchy sold us out.

They effectively bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with the US militarily. They lacked the infrastructure/economic diversity to effectively sustain other aspects of their nation concurrently.

America played the long game and it paid off

My understanding of it is that The USSR was hard nosed Godless communism. They were an empire that turned into a state after a bloody revolution.
The US is built on the idea that rights come from a creator, not the state. Free market enterprise is the economic model that is the linear result of building a republic on the idea that God has made each individual sovereign, master of his own destiny. Our founders clearly believed in God, and they laid the foundation for what would become the greatest country that has ever been, not despite their belief in God but because of it.
China, like Russia was an empire made a state by bloody revolution. Only they learned from the collapse of the USSR, and have evolved. Their current economic model is an attempt to have Capitalism without a free market. It is an evil system. It is built on slavery not freedom. The state has unquestioned sovereignty over the individual and all that he earns. It is what Capitalism looks like when the authors of said Capitalism are Godless.

The USSR collapsed because the Russian people wanted Levi's, Ray Bans and Metallica.

Perestroika and glasnost helped but was it too little too late.

The desire for Western culture killed the USSR.