# Quote — Norman Davies, Europe

> The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.

- Author: [Norman Davies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies.md)
- Book: [Europe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies/europe.md)
- Page: 1135
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Norman_Davies#Europe:_A_History_(1996)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies/europe/the-most-obvious

## More from this book

> Ch. 7: Renatio (p. 556)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies/europe/ch-7-renatio.md)

> There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.

p. 897 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies/europe/there-are-shades.md)

> Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.

p. 358 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/norman-davies/europe/arguably-the-only.md)