The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1991 shed new light upon the character of the two political systems, causing us to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This work is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the USSR--as multinational, federal communist states--and the reaction to these parallel collapses of European and US foreign policy. Structural similarities in the destabilization of the two states mean that their comparative study provides great insight into the demise of both.