How much did popular disaffection with communism, Soviet imperialism, and the Establishment in general contribute to the collapse of the USSR? This complex question has not, as yet, been sufficiently researched by scholars. Why not? First, few researchers have studied closely the at least partially visible roots of some sorts of disaffection — expressed by so-called dissidents — in the period from the mid-1950s to 1987. Second, when a wider range of types of discontent came into public view in 1988–89, some observers tended to misperceive them as being mostly reformist and pro-Gorbachev in nature,² rather than, in large measure, anti-Establishment, anti-imperial, or opposed to communism — at least in its familiar, oppressive form. And third, when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, some scholars like Martin Malia misinterpreted events in an opposite way. They saw the disaffection as constituting an authentic, popular, anti-communist revolution,³ not as being, mostly, waves of anti-Establishment protest against a corrupt elite class that was failing to deliver what it promised. This disaffection made an important contribution to the collapse of an empire. But it was not, in my opinion, an authentic revolution. Not only was Russia's class structure changed only at the margins. In addition, personnel turnover in the higher levels of the political institutions and the government bureaucracy was limited, with new members coming mostly from within the existing privileged elites.