All states attempt to marginalize challenges to their national orders. The USSR was no exception in this regard. But since the days of the Russian Civil War successive Soviet leaders proved ruthless in wielding the state's coercive instruments to normalize control over a multinational population. The Soviet state gained a reputation as one of the most repressive states in modern history – a reputation earned in significant respects for its repression of challenging nationalisms. Until the late 1980s that repression appeared from all angles to be extraordinarily efficient, even to the point that large numbers of Soviet citizens and outside observers came to believe in the impossibility of Soviet collapse.

In the end, coercion did not save the Soviet state. But the sense that it could have lingers in the debates over who is responsible for Soviet disintegration. One of the frequently cited puzzles of the Soviet collapse is why force was not deployed with greater vigor against the state's opponents – particularly against separatist nationalists. Some attribute this simply to a lack of will on the part of Gorbachev. Jerry Hough, for instance, has decried Gorbachev's failure to impose a Tiananmen-type crack-down on Soviet society, which he believes to have been a viable solution to the disorders unleashed by glasnost' but was irrationally rejected by Gorbachev.