Dissolution of the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  On 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 the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolor. The following day, the Soviet of the Republics formally dissolved a state that had existed for nearly seven decades, home to fifteen republics and hundreds of ethnic groups. The act was carried out through Declaration No. 142-N, a document voted into existence by the very legislative body that had once rubber-stamped every decision of the Communist Party.

  How did the most powerful totalitarian state of the twentieth century come apart in the span of a few years? The answers run deeper than any single crisis. They reach back to a new general secretary who took office in 1985 believing he could save Soviet socialism by reforming it, to coal miners who walked off the job in the summer of 1989, to two million people who joined hands across the Baltic coast, and to a protest in the streets of Yerevan that grew from a few thousand voices to nearly a million in less than a week. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was not a coup, not an invasion, and not a single dramatic rupture. It was a long unraveling, pulling simultaneously from dozens of directions at once.

• 2. Gorbachev's Gamble

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  Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party on the 11th of March 1985, just over four hours after his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko died at the age of 73. At 54, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo. His initial goal was straightforward: revive a stagnating economy. He understood quickly that economic revival required dismantling political structures that had calcified under decades of Brezhnev-era rule.

  On the 23rd of April 1985, Gorbachev brought two protégés into the Politburo as full members: Yegor Ligachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov. To keep the security apparatus on his side, he promoted KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov and added Defence Minister Marshal Sergei Sokolov as a candidate member. He cleared space for his agenda on the 1st of July by removing his main political rival, Grigory Romanov, from the Politburo, and then appointed Boris Yeltsin First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party in December.

  Gorbachev's two signature reforms were glasnost, which opened Soviet media to previously forbidden subjects, and perestroika, the restructuring of the economic and political system. The freedom of speech that glasnost permitted allowed nationalist movements that had been suppressed for generations to surface, organize, and grow into dominant political forces. At the 28th-the 30th of January 1987 Central Committee plenum, Gorbachev proposed demokratizatsiya, suggesting that future Communist Party elections allow multiple candidates chosen by secret ballot. The party delegates watered down the proposal, and meaningful democratic choice within the party was never seriously implemented. On the 7th of February 1987, dozens of political prisoners were freed in the first group release since the Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s.

  On the 23rd of December 1986, Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union's most prominent dissident, returned to Moscow after receiving a personal phone call from Gorbachev ending nearly seven years of internal exile. Sakharov's return signaled that Gorbachev meant his liberalization program to be real. It also set a precedent: the state's most feared weapon, the power to silence critics, was being put down.

• 3. The Baltic Spark

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  Estonia was the first Soviet republic to declare state sovereignty inside the Union, on the 16th of November 1988. The declaration was not a bolt from the blue. It emerged from years of organizing that had accelerated through the late 1980s, as popular fronts formed across all three Baltic republics and pressed for reform with growing confidence.

  The Popular Front of Estonia was founded in April 1988. Within months, Gorbachev replaced the old-guard leader of the Estonian Communist Party with the comparatively liberal Vaino Väljas, who quickly legalized the flying of the pre-Soviet blue-black-white flag and signed a law making Estonian the republic's official language. The Popular Front of Latvia was founded in June 1988; Lithuania's equivalent, Sąjūdis, in May 1988. Across all three republics, newly appointed Communist leaders made similar concessions: flags, languages, and symbols of national identity that had been banned were restored one by one.

  The most vivid moment came on the 23rd of August 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. An estimated two million people joined hands in a human chain stretching 600 km from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. Organizers called it the Baltic Way. The pact they were commemorating had divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and led directly to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940. In December 1989, the Congress of People's Deputies accepted a commission report condemning the secret protocols of that pact, and Gorbachev signed it.

  Lithuania moved fastest. In the March 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, 36 of Lithuania's 42 deputies were candidates from Sąjūdis, the greatest electoral victory for any national organization within the Soviet Union. By December 1989, the Communist Party of Lithuania, under Algirdas Brazauskas, split from the Soviet Communist Party and abandoned its claim to a constitutionally guaranteed leading role in politics. On the 11th of March 1990, the newly elected Lithuanian parliament elected Vytautas Landsbergis chairman and proclaimed the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, making Lithuania the first Soviet republic to declare outright independence.

• 4. Fire in the Caucasus

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  On the 20th of February 1988, the regional Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave inside the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, voted to secede and join Armenia. The vote was unprecedented: a small, remote corner of the Soviet Union had openly defied both republican and national authorities. News spread immediately.

  Two days later, thousands of Azerbaijanis began marching toward Nagorno-Karabakh after rumors spread of an Azerbaijani killed in Stepanakert. Officials denied the incident, but the march continued. Clashes left two Azerbaijanis dead. Their deaths, announced on state radio, triggered the Sumgait pogrom. Between the 26th of February and the 1st of March, violent anti-Armenian rioting in Sumgait killed at least 32 people. Authorities deployed paratroopers and tanks and nearly all of the city's 14,000 Armenian residents fled.

  In Yerevan, the Armenian capital, demonstrations that began on the 18th of February with small crowds swelled with astonishing speed. By the 20th of February, 30,000 people filled Theater Square. Two days later, 100,000 were there; the following day, 300,000; by the 25th of February, close to a million, more than a quarter of Armenia's entire population. The eleven-member Karabakh Committee, which included the future first president of independent Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan, emerged to lead the movement.

  Gorbachev refused to alter Nagorno-Karabakh's status and instead replaced Communist Party leaders in both republics. Violence continued to escalate. In the autumn of 1988, Armenian nationalists expelled nearly all of the 200,000-strong Azerbaijani minority from Armenia, with over 100 killed. In November 1988, half a million demonstrators gathered in Baku's Lenin Square over eighteen days. Soviet police cleared the square by force on the 5th of December and imposed a curfew that lasted ten months.

  The violence peaked in January 1990. Late on the 19th of January, after cutting phone and radio lines and blowing up the central television station, 26,000 Soviet troops entered Baku, attacking protesters and firing into crowds. More than 130 people died, most of them civilians, and more than 700 were wounded. Soviet Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov stated publicly that the operation was intended to prevent the non-communist opposition from winning upcoming free elections. The army retook Baku; Azerbaijan, in every other sense, was lost. Thousands of Communist Party members burned their membership cards at the public funerals that followed.

• 5. The War of Laws

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  By 1990, the political crisis had moved to the legislative chambers. On the 7th of February, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accepted Gorbachev's recommendation that the party give up its constitutional monopoly on power. In elections across all fifteen republics that year, reformers and ethnic nationalists won seats in substantial numbers. The Communist Party lost outright in five republics: Lithuania, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and Georgia.

  The republics' newly empowered parliaments launched what observers called a war of laws. They rejected Soviet legislation that conflicted with their own, asserted control over local economies, and refused to pay taxes to Moscow. Lithuania exempted its men from mandatory Soviet military service. On the 12th of June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic adopted its own declaration of sovereignty, meaning that even the largest republic was asserting precedence of its laws over those of the union. On the 12th of July, Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party in a speech before the 28th Congress.

  In Ukraine, which had been considered one of the more conservative republics, the changes were sweeping. On the 16th of July 1990, the Ukrainian Parliament voted 355 to 4 to adopt a Declaration of State Sovereignty. A separate vote of 339 to 5 proclaimed the 16th of July a Ukrainian national holiday. Students pitched tent cities in Kiev demanding the resignation of the prime minister; in October, Prime Minister Vitaliy Masol resigned. Parliament voted to delete from the Ukrainian constitution the clause referring to the Communist Party's leading role.

  The war of laws disrupted supply chains across the union, accelerating economic decline. The Soviet economy, already burdened by the arms race with the United States and by military commitments abroad, could not absorb the additional damage. Gorbachev's effort to hold the union together through a new union treaty became the central political contest of 1991.

• 6. The August Coup and Its Aftermath

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  On the 19th of August 1991, a group of Communist hardliners and senior military figures attempted to overthrow Gorbachev while he was on vacation at his dacha in Crimea. They called themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency. Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building and called on citizens to resist. The coup collapsed within three days.

  Its failure accelerated every separatist dynamic that Gorbachev's reforms had set in motion. The central government in Moscow lost the authority and credibility that had remained to it. In the days and months that followed, republic after republic declared independence. The secession of the Baltic states was formally recognized in September 1991.

  On the 8th of December 1991, the leaders of the three founding Slavic republics met at Belovezha, a forested reserve on the Belarusian-Polish border. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Chairman Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. The Kazakh SSR was the last republic to leave, proclaiming independence on the 16th of December. On the 21st of December, all former Soviet republics except Georgia and the three Baltic states signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, formally joining the CIS.

  Gorbachev resigned on the 25th of December and transferred his presidential powers, including control of the nuclear launch codes, to Yeltsin. Russia became the Soviet Union's de facto successor state by virtue of being its largest and most populous republic. Declaration No. 142-N, passed by the Soviet of the Republics on the 26th of December 1991, formally dissolved the union. The fifteen republics that had once been administered from Moscow were now fifteen independent states, their sovereignty confirmed by the very body that had once denied it.

• 7. Roots of the Collapse

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  The dissolution traced to forces that predated Gorbachev's reforms by years. Helsinki-86, founded in Latvia, was the first openly anti-Communist organization in the Soviet Union and set an early model for other ethnic minorities seeking independence. On the 26th of December 1986, 300 Latvian youths marched down Lenin Avenue in Riga toward the Freedom Monument, shouting for a free Latvia. Security forces confronted them and overturned police vehicles. The Soviet state treated the march as a disturbance to be suppressed, not as a signal to be read.

  The December 1986 Jeltoqsan riots in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, had been sparked when Gorbachev replaced the ethnic Kazakh First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan with an outsider from the Russian SFSR. Between 200 and 300 students began demonstrating on the 17th of December in front of the Central Committee building; by the 18th, clashes between troops, militia, and Kazakh students had turned into a wide-scale confrontation requiring three days to control.

  Coal miners in the Kuznetsk Basin launched strikes on the 10th of July 1989 over prices, safety conditions, and disgust at corruption. Miners in Ukraine's Donbas and the northern city of Vorkuta joined them. The Soviet government ended the strikes in late July by promising to enshrine the workers' demands in law, but the underlying anger continued to grow. Ukraine's miners, in particular, connected themselves to Ukrainian dissident groups, and the Independent Union of Miners, the Soviet Union's first independent trade union, was founded in July 1990.

  The arms race with the United States imposed costs the Soviet economy could not sustain. Chronic economic stagnation compounded the burden of foreign conflicts. Gorbachev's own reforms, particularly glasnost, created the conditions under which these accumulated pressures could be openly named, organized around, and acted upon. The Spitak earthquake of the 7th of December 1988, which killed an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 people in Armenia, illustrated the system's limits with brutal clarity, and even a natural disaster could not suspend the political demands of the Karabakh Committee.