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This. The Soviet Union fell because the Brezhnev generation of CPSU leadership (Andropov and Chernenko were not significantly younger than Brezhnev) was not able to recruit and develop a next generation of leaders who believed in the system to the extent that they were willing to fight to maintain it. (I don't know how long Gorbachev could have stayed in power if he was willing to be as brutal as Brezhnev, but ultimately the reason why the Soviet Union fell was that he didn't try, and Yeltsin, who was the other pre-eminent CPSU leader of his generation, actively sabotaged it when someone else did (in the 1991 coup).
And the secret weapon, the mind control ray that turned Yeltsin into the double agent who would end the Cold War with a crushing NATO victory, was a supermarket.
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