Collapse of the Soviet Union
On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television to announce his resignation as President of the Soviet Union. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, replaced by the Russian tricolour. The Soviet Union, which had existed since 1922, formally ceased to exist two days later when the Supreme Soviet voted to dissolve it. In its place emerged fifteen independent states: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the three Baltic republics, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the five Central Asian republics. The Cold War was definitively over. The USSR's collapse resulted from a convergence of causes that had been building for decades and were dramatically accelerated by Gorbachev's reforms. The Soviet economy, burdened by military spending, the costs of Afghanistan, Chernobyl, and the fundamental inefficiencies of central planning, had stagnated. Glasnost had unleashed nationalist movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and the Caucasus that Gorbachev could not control without violence he refused to authorise. A failed coup attempt by hardliners in August 1991 fatally undermined communist party authority. The December 1991 agreement between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States removed the institutional underpinning of the Union. What Kennan had predicted in 1946 — that the internal contradictions of the Soviet system would eventually produce its collapse — had come to pass, forty-five years later.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
