Curated playlist
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
- New Union TreatyThe New Union Treaty was a document that might have saved a superpower. In the summer of 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was racing against time to hold fifteen republics together under a reformed federal system. A signing…
- Demokratizatsiya (Soviet Union)Demokratizatsiya landed on the Soviet political scene in January 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, called for the infusion of "democratic" elements into a system built on single-party rule. The word…
- Era of StagnationMikhail Gorbachev called the Era of Stagnation 'the lowest stage of socialism' once he had the power to say so. The phrase carried weight. It was a verdict on twenty years of Soviet governance, delivered by the man who inherited them. It…
- 1991 Soviet Union referendumOn the 17th of March 1991, Soviet citizens across nine republics were handed a ballot with a question that had never before been put to a national vote: should the USSR survive? It was the only national referendum in the entire history of…
- Reagan DoctrinePresident James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 to establish a new boundary for American foreign policy. Theodore Roosevelt followed with his own corollary in 1904 that expanded U.S. intervention rights in the Western Hemisphere.…
- Belovezha AccordsThe Belovezha Accords were signed on the 8th of December 1991, in a state dacha near Viskuli, deep inside the ancient forest of Belovezhskaya Pushcha in Belarus. Six men gathered around a table in what had once been a hunting retreat…
- Dissolution of the Soviet UnionOn the evening of the 25th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union and handed over his nuclear launch codes to Boris Yeltsin. That night, the red hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin for…
- Baltic WayThe Baltic Way began at exactly 19:00 local time on the 23rd of August 1989, when approximately two million people across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania lifted their arms and joined hands. For 15 minutes, a living line stretched 675…
- Post-Soviet statesThe Post-Soviet states came into existence on the 26th of December 1991, the day the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Fifteen countries emerged from that dissolution, stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Uzbekistan on the…
- Nostalgia for the Soviet UnionNostalgia for the Soviet Union has its own dark joke, repeated across the former USSR. What did capitalism manage to do in one year that communism could not do in seventy? Made communism look good. That joke points to a mood shared by…
- The BarricadesThe Barricades of 1991 began with a radio broadcast at 4:45 in the morning on the 13th of January. A voice from Latvian radio called people to gather in Riga Cathedral Square. By midday, around 700,000 people had come. Soviet helicopters…
- Commonwealth of Independent StatesThe Commonwealth of Independent States came into existence on the 8th of December 1991, born inside a forest reserve roughly 50 kilometres north of Brest, Belarus. Three men met at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Natural Reserve and signed a…
- SąjūdisSąjūdis began not as a revolution but as a meeting. On the 3rd of June 1988, at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius, a group of 35 people gathered, most of them artists and intellectuals, roughly half of them members of the very…
- War of LawsThe War of Laws was a conflict fought not with weapons but with paper: competing legislation, rival tax codes, and contradictory constitutional claims that tore the Soviet Union apart from 1989 to 1991. The first shot was fired in Estonia…
- 1991 Russian presidential electionRussia's first presidential election took place on the 12th of June 1991, and Boris Yeltsin won it with 58.6% of the vote. That margin was decisive enough to eliminate any need for a runoff. Yeltsin became the first leader in Russian…