Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and asks why it fell so peacefully. This DeVane Lecture, part of his course Power and Politics in Today's World, covers the euphoria of the early 1990s, the transition from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin, and the emergence of what Shapiro calls Russian gangster capitalism. He examines why market reforms produced entrenched corruption rather than stable democracy, and connects the era's disappointments to present day political resentment. The lecture draws on Shapiro's book After the Fall and was delivered to Yale students and the public in fall 2019. It runs seventy one minutes and functions as a straightforward classroom lecture, with Shapiro working through causes and consequences of the Soviet collapse in a continuous historical argument rather than a panel or survey format.