Orlov, Dmitry. The Five Stages of Collapse. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2013. ISBN 978-0-86571-736-7.
The author was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the United States with his family in the mid-1970s at the age of 12. He experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent events in Russia on a series of extended visits between the late 1980s and mid 1990s. In his 2008 book Reinventing Collapse (April 2009) he described the Soviet collapse and assessed the probability of a collapse of the United States, concluding such a collapse was inevitable.

In the present book, he steps back from the specifics of the collapse of overextended superpowers to examine the process of collapse as it has played out in a multitude of human societies since the beginning of civilisation. The author argues that collapse occurs in five stages, with each stage creating the preconditions for the next.

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