The author argues that the main reasons for the disintegration of the USSR, mainly objective in nature, are the departure from the socialist trajectory of development, and lie in the socio-economic and economic-political spheres, but not in the field of geopolitics. Based on the use of the currently ignored dialectical-materialist method and the socio-philosophical developments of the post-Soviet school of critical Marxism, the contradictions that became the basis of both progress and regression of the “red” (communist) line of development of the USSR are highlighted. These contradictions make it possible to characterize the social system of the USSR as an advanced mutationof the general historical trend in the genesis of the “kingdom of freedom”. It is shown that the social basis for the USSR dissolution was the displacement of social and creative principles by relations (and the actors representing them) of alienation in the USSR and other countries of the world socialist system.