Many people here are too young to remember why the former USSR collapsed , and those who were reading newspapers and watching television news were misled because the media falsely gave President Reagan credit for that collapse. You should to some research to verify that what I am about to say is correct, because if America ignores this important historical lesson, the result will be disaster for the United States.

The former USSR collapsed because it accumulated too high a foreign debt. Over many years before Reagan became President, the former USSR borrowed money to pay for imports, and since it wasn't exporting enough to pay for imports, that nation was forced to borrow money to pay the interest on the growing debt. Over the years, the foreign debt of the former USSR rose in a compounded way. Eventually, it was necessary to borrow so many billions of dollars per year to just pay the interest that the international banks and other creditors balked. That caused a collapse of the economy of the former USSR. 

As the economy collapsed, the international banks told the USSR that they would be able to lend some money to pay interest if the government changed the economy of the USSR from a communist system to a capitalist system. The United States promised to provide several tens of billions of dollars in aid if the USSR did this. So the former USSR changed her econimic system to a capitalist one, but the United States didn't actually give that aid in the end, and the banks didn't help out either, so the economy continued downward for a period of time. Eventually, of course, the economic collapse of the former USSR reached a bottom, and many of the nations the USSR broke up into have been slowly recovering since. But it was a very low bottom. A massive number of people were running around the streets trying to sell their household goods in order to gain money for food, for example.