As for comparing a putative future collapse of The West™ to that of the Soviet Union, there's this lecture by Dmitry Orlov (I think I first got a link to that from ET, but I don't know in what thread). "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
If you were a merchant or someone else in the middle classes, I'd expect that it was very catastrophic indeed. If you were one of the peasants, possibly not so much.
The ruling elites were either slaughtered or adapted to new masters - which would doubtless have been catastrophic for them too.
