&gt; The Soviets were brought down by the humble FAX machine.<p>Assuming your description is accurate, this is still only sort of true.<p>The Soviets were such a disaster that their downfall was greatly overdetermined. Without fax machines, they would have been brought down by something else.<p>&quot;Old age&quot; used to be an official cause of death. There was a period when we started doing autopsies on people who had died of old age, and discovered (keep in mind this was new information at the time!) that in every single case, those people had died of some malfunction that would have killed anyone else, old or not.<p>But, after a spree of autopsying people with the goal of preventing death, we figured out that there were basically no implications to this. What happens when you&#x27;re old is that everything is failing all the time. Remove a 20-year-old&#x27;s ruptured appendix and they&#x27;ll probably go on for several more decades; if you fix a similarly severe problem in an 80-year-old, they&#x27;re unlikely to get one more decade, because a <i>completely different problem</i> will kill them shortly afterwards.<p>The Soviets were like that.