Dmitri Orlov is providing an invaluable service with his book and speeches. Although he now lives in the US, he witnessed Soviet Russia implode and makes very astute observations about the condition of the US now and Russia just before they collapsed in the early nineties. Interestingly, he concludes that the US, with its hyper-efficient systems, will fail more quickly and catastrophically than the Soviet system did, which had a lot of built-in waste and therefore more resilience. His collapse model looks like this:
- Stage 1: Financial collapse.
- Stage 2: Commercial collapse.
- Stage 3: Political collapse.
- Stage 4: Social collapse.
- Stage 5: Cultural collapse.
Here are his best presentations, including those that discuss his collapse model in detail. Must reading and viewing for everyone.
- Closing the Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US (Dec, 2006)
- The Five Stages of Collapse (Feb, 2008)
- Presentation of Five Stages of Collapse at Community Solution Conference (Nov 2008)
- Video of Social Collapse Best Practices (transcript) (Feb, 2009) — Excellent and funny talk given at The Long Now Foundation
- Interview on Russia Today (March 2009)