Collapse of the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union ceased to exist on 26 December 1991 and the flag came down over the Kremlin the evening before. The year had begun with a violent attempt to hold it together — special forces killing fourteen people at the Vilnius television tower in January — and had continued with a referendum in March in which the six republics that intended to leave refused to take part. Gorbachev spent the spring negotiating a new union treaty devolving most powers to the republics. The coup of 19 August was mounted by the men who had signed it: the vice-president, the prime minister, the defence and interior ministers and the head of the KGB, who put Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and announced a state of emergency. It collapsed in three days. The plotters were visibly drunk at their own press conference, the troops sent to Moscow would not fire, and Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament. What it destroyed was the centre. Gorbachev returned to a country where his authority had gone to the man who had defended the building, the party was suspended, and the republics declared independence one after another. Ukraine voted 90 per cent for it on 1 December. Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich signed the dissolution in a hunting lodge on 8 December. Gorbachev resigned on television on 25 December, and fifteen states existed where one had been. The dissolution left twenty-five million ethnic Russians outside Russia, four nuclear states where there had been one, and a set of internal administrative borders that became international ones overnight. Several of the wars since 1992 have been fought along them.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
