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On Christmas Day 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev shocked the world with these words, announcing the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation from its top post. After more than 40 years of the world seeming to teeter on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States had ended.
What had been the world’s largest communist state—and the counterweight to the United States—broke into 15 independent republics, making America the sole global superpower. And although at its peak the Soviet Union had more than 5 million soldiers stationed internationally and enough nuclear power to destroy the human race, members of the Soviet high command abdicated power without a shot being fired.
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on the second day of the extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow on August 27, 1991. He threatened to resign if the republics refused to sign a Union Treaty to hold the Soviet Union together. (Credit: Vitaly Armand/AFP/Getty Images)
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on the second day of the extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow on August 27, 1991. He threatened to resign if the republics refused to sign a Union Treaty to hold the Soviet Union together. (Credit: Vitaly Armand/AFP/Getty Images)
Was Gorbachev a weak leader?
The Russian public has largely interpreted Gorbachev’s ending of the Soviet Union as a disaster bordering on treason. In a 2017 poll of Russians, his approval rating stood well below that of wartime dictator Joseph Stalin.
When he became president of the Soviet Union in 1985, Gorbachev inherited both a moribund economy and a crumbling political system. Many historians believe that the two policies he put in place to address the nation’s challenges, glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”), hastened the dissolution of the Soviet system, which was already in decline.
Glasnost, begun in the late ’80s, was a push for transparency in governance. It curbed state censorship, allowing Soviet media to report painful, long-covered-up truths—such as the fact that alcoholism and infant mortality were rising, life expectancy at birth was declining and standards of living in the West were outpacing those in the USSR. It also allowed non-Communist parties to take part in elections.
Perestroika, undertaken at the same time, was an economic-reform process aimed at reviving a long-suffering economy. It moved the USSR away from a central-command model, in which business was owned and administered by the government, toward a hybrid communism-capitalism model incorporating free-market reform. Citizens were allowed to begin opening private businesses, and foreigners were allowed into the country to take part in joint ventures.
The measures were met first with enthusiasm: When a McDonalds restaurant opened in the nation’s capital in January 1990, Muscovites marveled at “three-story sandwiches” and smiling fast-food cashiers. But when the growing pains of perestroika led to a new wave of shortages and economic hardship, newly empowered regional leaders of the non-Russian Union Republics, such as Lithuania and Ukraine, used their freshly opened political process to demand autonomy from the Kremlin, ultimately leading to the USSR’s demise.
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