A.S. Panarin’s Concept of the USSR Collapse Civilizational Causes

The article discusses the concept of A.S. Panarin concerning the civilizational causes of the collapse of the USSR. The author singles out the main components of this concept, in particular: the general conditionality of this event by hidden global factors; the role of the betrayal of the Soviet elite and its causes; the mental factor effective at the level of mass consciousness; the phenomenon of social “negative selection” destroying society from within and resulting from the immanent nature of the Soviet system. It is shown that for A.S. Panarin, the collapse of the USSR was one of the manifestations of the “Enlightenment project” crisis, which still remains insurmountable nowadays and is the source of new crisis