A eulogy of the Soviet Union would read that the 74-year-old superpower succumbed to a prolonged illness on December 31, 1991. During its final months, increasingly desperate measures were used in an attempt to stave off the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but these served only to delay the inevitable. The bureaucratic structures that had governed one-sixth of Earth’s landmass crumbled, and a succession of former Soviet republics declared their independence. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became independent in September, and the sovereignty of Ukraine was confirmed via plebiscite in December. Although the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was intended to serve as something of a successor to the Soviet Union, the bulk of the Soviet state’s geopolitical weight—as well as its nuclear arsenal—shifted to Russia. On December 25 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president, and six days later the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist.
The Cold War had largely defined international relations in the latter half of the 20th century, but despite the ever-present threat of nuclear war, there existed a degree of stability. Although the arsenals controlled by Moscow and Washington, D.C., were capable of destroying the world many times over, the promise of mutually assured destruction meant that cooler heads prevailed, even in tense confrontations such as the Cuban missile crisis. The détente that had prevailed through the 1970s ended abruptly with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, and the subsequent quagmire hastened the decline of the Soviet empire and provided a fertile breeding ground for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As casualties mounted in Afghanistan, the Soviet government faced internal and external threats that it was ill-equipped to combat. Dissidents such as Andrey Sakharov spoke out against the political oppression that was rampant in the Soviet Union, while American initiatives such as Radio Free Europe broadcast Western ideas and music behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet economy was in an uncontrolled downward spiral; agricultural output was down; and bureaucratic reforms adopted by Nikita Khrushchev had devolved administrative power to the republics. These regions now agitated for increased autonomy. The early 1980s also saw a succession of deaths among the top echelons of the Communist Party: Aleksey Kosygin (1980), Mikhail Suslov (1982), Leonid Brezhnev (1982), Yury Andropov (1984), and Konstantin Chernenko (1985). When Gorbachev took power in March 1985, he attempted to reverse the economic decline that had begun under Brezhnev. Efforts to transition away from a command economy were only minimally successful, however, and it became increasingly obvious that Moscow could no longer project the sort of military power that had crushed the Prague Spring. Warsaw Pact countries shook off their communist governments: Solidarity swept into power in Poland in June 1989; Hungary opened its border with Austria in September; and the Berlin Wall was toppled in November.
Eastern Europe was rapidly escaping Moscow’s orbit, although it seemed possible, even at this late stage, that the U.S.S.R. might be preserved. Gorbachev’s attempts at top-down reform, however, had been too ambitious from a political standpoint and not ambitious enough economically. Shortages and rationing reached levels not seen since Stalin’s day, and Russia began to assert its sovereignty over that of the Soviet state. In a final violent spasm, Soviet troops killed more than a dozen civilian protesters in Vilnius, Lithuania, in January 1991. The willingness of these troops to fire on civilians led those at the top level of the military, the KGB, and the Communist Party to assume that similar methods could be used in Moscow. They were wrong. An attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 failed spectacularly when dispirited Russian troops refused to move against fellow Russians. Although Gorbachev remained in power, a fatal blow had been dealt to the Soviet state, and within months both he and it would be relegated to the annals of history.
