The collapse of the USSR was unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful. The ideological superstructure disintegrated, the leviathan ceased to exist, yet across Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, violence rarely escalated. A few social actors seized security structures and dragged their states into chaos, but this sort of thing was not even attempted in the Baltic states or in most of the new states of Central Asia. In the Kyrgyz city of Osh, in the ethnically mixed Ferghana Valley, there were violent pogroms in 1990 – followed by a court-led investigation by the new Kyrgyz government in 1991, where forty-six of the forty-eight participants in the pogroms charged were found guilty. Georgi Derluguian (2005) recounts the story of the tiny Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where escalation tactics by rowdy warlords were cauterized by local innovation. Are there patterned regularities to the divergent outcomes – violent or nonviolent, democratic or nondemocratic – in the post-Soviet space? David Laitin (2006), in a playful summary of Derluguian's class-based analysis, speculates the following answer to this important question:

First, there is the nomenklatura, the high officials of the Soviet state.… Provincial Soviet life involved families buying state or party appointments, in order to then distribute bribe-friendly posts to relatives. All this was quite comfortable for the nomenklatura until the state began to unravel. They then had to make a historic choice: they could steal what they could of state assets and run; they could seek support from the newly reconstituted centre in Moscow to help them regain power; or they could transmogrify into nationalist elites and seek to lead independent states.… Second, there are the national intellectuals, a sub-class of the industrial proletariat.… Universities, Palaces of Culture and local soviets assured positions for this new class of national intellectuals.