History of the Soviet Union (1964–82) become Mao's last meeting with any Soviet leader. The Cultural Revolution caused a complete meltdown of Sino-Soviet relations, inasmuch as Moscow (along with every communist state save for Albania) considered that event to be simple-minded insanity. Red Guards denounced the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc as revisionists who pursued a false socialism and of being in collusion with the forces of imperialism. Brezhnev was referred to as "the new Hitler" and the Soviets as warmongers who neglected their people's living standards in favor of military spending. In 1968 Lin Biao, the Chinese Defence Minister, claimed that the Soviet
Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would fall before the eventual dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Authors often credited with having predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union include Andrei Amalrik in "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" (1970), French academic Emmanuel Todd in "La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere)" (1976), economist Ravi Batra in his 1978 book "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism" and French historian Hélène Carrère