The economy was rotten, the political process was rotten, they had developed a central government that was no longer believed by people outside of Moscow, there was total cynicism throughout
the Soviet system of governance, there was no real civil society.
And he understood, better than many churchmen but in harmony with the thinking
of John Paul II, that the key to resolving the dangers posed by the nuclear deterrence
system, in which the United States and the
Soviet Union both had the capacity to «bounce the rubble,» was the collapse
of the communist project and dramatic change in the
governance of what was then the USSR.