I'm still waiting for you to name ONE. Claiming the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact fell "without a shot" is absurd to the point of asinine! What were all those tracers I saw at the assault of the russian "white house" ... fireworks?
Well I see both sides of this argument. I think the Velvet Revolution (which was really just splitting the Soviet synthetic country "Czechoslovakia" into it's two organic parts, is the classic non-violent revolution. Some of the others seemed pretty reasonable as examples too.
The fall of the USSR, however, is a whole different beast. To claim the fall only occurred right at that point in 1989 is to overlook the entire cold war. But the cold war happened, it consisted of equal parts propaganda, espionage and proxy wars. The proxy wars included Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Angola, Cuba, Afghanistan, and many others. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions) died in these wars.
All of them, together, put and kept tremendous pressure on the USSR, which eventually cracked and fell.
So, IMHO the Cold War with the USSR can not be considered bloodless.
You’re right, there was sporadic fighting and I don’t mean to diminish that. What I don’t accept is that this is an excuse to start a civil war with weapons not words. I would have thought that we had our fill of Americans killing Americans in 1864, but, we all have short memories.
Hopefully we are past the stage where we have to kill each other to resolve this constitutional crisis.