The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a major global historical event of the 20th century that permanently changed the destiny of hundreds of millions of people around the world. It was not a revolution. It was not a transition to democracy. It was not a struggle for decolonization. No one expected a world power like the Soviet Union to disintegrate into 15 autonomous republics. Historians, social science researchers, and other observers of the Soviet Union were all surprised by the sudden collapse of a political system that was sustained for 70 years by a political ideology and which had dominated a significant portion of the global land mass, its people, cultures, and resources. How do we explain the disintegration of a super power? What theories of change may be valid in a case that has no precedent? This paper seeks to explore the causes of the disintegration of the Soviet Union through the formulation and testing of a correlative hypothesis: A strong correlation exists between the break-up of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the disintegration of the Soviet state. This hypothesis is specific, testable, verifiable, and it is supported by historical evidence and events examined in the paper.