The author puts forward a thesis about the significant dependence of the collapse of the USSR on the death of the Soviet socio-economic system. Far from identifying these two processes, the author considers both the emergence and the demise of the Soviet system as the result of certain objective historical, economic and social prerequisites, without taking the view of this phenomenon as a subjective deviation from the laws of world civilization or the “zigzag of history”. The article examines the grounds that made it possible to restore the joint statehood of the peoples who inhabited the Russian Empire, and concludes that this became possible only because of the peculiarity of the Soviet socio-economic system. To the extent that the Soviet system could realize the socialist tendency inherent in it, to the extent that the solidarity of the peoples united in the USSR was possible. To the extent that this trend was subjected to bureaucratic erosion, to the extent that the potential for nationalism and the subsequent disintegration of the USSR accumulated. The disintegration of the Soviet socio-economic system finally destroyed the foundation on which the Union of the peoples of the USSR was built.