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Dissolution of the Soviet Union

process leading to the late-1991 breakup of the USSR

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process by which the Soviet Union was disestablished as a government, sovereign state, and subject of international law. This included the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the former communist ruling party of the country. The collapse of the Soviet Union also ended the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was succeeded by fifteen successor states, most prominently the Russian Federation.

Quotes

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  • The rush of events in the Soviet Union, Germany, eastern Europe and China in the late 1980s and the very early 1990s had no parallel in modern history. During the last thousand years no other formidable empire in a time of comparative peace had been dissolved so quickly, so unexpectedly, as the Soviet Union.
  • The world situation has worsened with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The spartan lifestyle that had been imposed in the Soviet Empire means that today, the peoples of that region are the only white remnant that has been uncontaminated by “the ethical syphilis of Hollywood,” and hence the frenetic manner by which “the enemy of Europe” attempts to contaminate these regions — some of whose states, such as Hungary, consciously resist it. “The Enemy of Europe” is now the world-enemy.
  • A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow.
    • Michael Burleigh Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, New York: NY, HarperCollins Publishers (2007) p. 415
  • Nothing better illustrated the realities of the Soviet collapse than the fate of Sergei Krikalyev, a Soviet cosmonaut who was fired into space in May 1991. He was still circling the earth at the end of the year for want of a decision to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower; he would return to a world from which the Soviet Union had disappeared. His controllers at the Baikonur Space Centre found themselves in the independent republic of Kazakhstan.
  • The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.
  • The Marxist prediction that capitalism would ultimately collapse and be replaced by socialism (Khrushchev’s tactless ‘We will bury you!’) had been a comfort to Soviet Communists as they struggled against Russia’s historical ‘backwardness’ to make a modern, industrialised, urbanised society. They made it, more or less, by the beginning of the 1980s. Soviet power and status was recognised throughout the world. ‘Soviet man’ became a recognisable animal, with close relatives in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, more problematic relatives in China and North Korea, and admirers in the Third World. Then, in one of the most spectacular unpredicted ‘accidents’ of modern history, it was Soviet ‘socialism’ that collapsed, giving way to what the Russians called the ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s. An array of fifteen new successor states, including the Russian Federation, emerged blinking into the light of freedom – all, including the Russians, loudly complaining that in the old days of the Soviet Union they had been victims of exploitation.
  • Gorbachev was never willing to leap directly to a market economy in the way that Deng Xiaoping had done. He reminded the Politburo late in 1988 that Franklin D. Roosevelt had saved American capitalism by "borrowing] socialist ideas of planning, state regulation, [and] . . . the principle of more social fairness." The implication was that Gorbachev could save socialism by borrowing from capitalism, but just how remained uncertain. "[R]epeated incantations about 'socialist values' and purified ideas of October,'" Chernyaev observed several months later, "provoke an ironic response in knowing listeners. . . . [T]hey sense that there's nothing behind them." After the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev acknowledged his failure. "The Achilles heel of socialism was the inability to link the socialist goal with the provision of incentives for efficient labor and the encouragement of initiative on the part of individuals. It became clear in practice that a market provides such incentives best of all."
  • Fate had it that when I found myself at the head of the state it was already clear that all was not well in the country. There is plenty of everything: land, oil and gas, other natural riches, and God gave us lots of intelligence and talent, yet we lived much worse than developed countries and keep falling behind them more and more. The reason could already be seen: The society was suffocating in the vise of the command-bureaucratic system, doomed to serve ideology and bear the terrible burden of the arms race. It had reached the limit of its possibilities. All attempts at partial reform, and there had been many, had suffered defeat, one after another. The country was losing perspective. We could not go on living like that. Everything had to be changed radically. The process of renovating the country and radical changes in the world turned out to be far more complicated than could be expected. However, what has been done ought to be given its due. This society acquired freedom, liberated itself politically and spiritually, and this is the foremost achievement which we have not yet understood completely, because we have not learned to use freedom.
  • However, work of historic significance has been accomplished. The totalitarian system which deprived the country of an opportunity to become successful and prosperous long ago has been eliminated. A breakthrough has been achieved on the way to democratic changes. Free elections, freedom of the press, religious freedoms, representative organs of power, a multiparty (system) became a reality; human rights are recognized as the supreme principle. However, work of historic significance has been accomplished. The totalitarian system which deprived the country of an opportunity to become successful and prosperous long ago has been eliminated. A breakthrough has been achieved on the way to democratic changes. Free elections, freedom of the press, religious freedoms, representative organs of power, a multiparty (system) became a reality; human rights are recognized as the supreme principle. The movement to a diverse economy has started, equality of all forms of property is becoming established, people who work on the land are coming to life again in the framework of land reform, farmers have appeared, millions of acres of land are being given over to people who live in the countryside and in towns. Economic freedom of the producer has been legalized, and entrepreneurship, shareholding, privatization are gaining momentum. In turning the economy toward a market, it is important to remember that all this is done for the sake of the individual. At this difficult time, all should be done for his social protection, especially for senior citizens and children.
  • The totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and in most of its satellites is breaking down, and our nations are looking for a way to democracy and independence. The first act in this remarkable drama began when Mr. Gorbachev and those around him faced the sad reality of their country, initiated a policy of perestroika. Obviously, they had no idea either of what they were setting in motion or how rapidly events would unfold. We knew a lot about the enormous number of growing problems that slumbered beneath the honeyed, unchanging mask of socialism. But I don't think any of us knew how little it would take for these problems to manifest themselves in all their enormity and for the longings of these nations to emerge in all their strength. The mask fell away so rapidly that, in the flood of work, we have literally no time even to be astonished. Europe to 'Seek Its Own Identity'
  • For two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev struggled to maintain control. He sought free elections to party soviets and thus the democratization of political life. It was not easy. In losing its autocratic character, the Communist Party lost its brain and its spine. It disintegrated, and with it the fount of institutional discipline within the Leninist-Stalinist empire. Into the resulting vacuum flowed empire’s most insistent opponents, nationalism and anarchy.
    • Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Putin to Pericles (2018)
  • In Moscow, the result was power shifting from Gorbachev’s Kremlin to the headquarters of the formerly somnolent Russian republic in its ‘White House’ on the Moscow River. Here a new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was a boisterous, bibulous throwback to past Moscow rulers. He resisted a coup attempt in August 1991 by KGB hardliners, when Gorbachev was briefly absent by the Black Sea. By December, the Warsaw Pact regimes were going their own way and so was Russia itself. A weakened Gorbachev was finally forced to sign the formal dismantling of the USSR. It meant his own downfall and Yeltsin (1991–9) moving into the Kremlin. On New Year’s Day 1992, the hammer-and-sickle that had graced the fortress battlements for sixty-eight years was hauled down, and the tsarist tricolour rose in its place.
    • Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Putin to Pericles (2018)
  • The collapse of Soviet communism marked the intellectual vindication of American ideals and, ironically, brought America face to face with the kind of world it had been seeking to escape throughout its history. In the emerging international order, nationalism has gained a new lease on life. Nations have pursued self-interest more frequently than high-minded principle, and have competed more than they have cooperated. There is little evidence to suggest that this age-old mode of behavior has changed, or that it is likely to change in the decades ahead.
  • You know, I thought that when we ended the Cold War, one of the most profound, I would say, principles was one that President Gorbachev, then the president of the Soviet Union, expounded. He said, you know, security must be security for all. And that was precisely how he justified reduction in the Soviet military. And even before the Soviet Union broke up, we were living in peace, and we had a united Europe. Many people seem to feel that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the end of the Cold War. That’s wrong. It had ended two years before that. And the breakup of the Soviet Union did not occur because of Western pressure; it occurred because of internal pressures within the Soviet Union. And it was something that President Bush did not wish. As a matter of fact, one of his last speeches, when there was a Soviet Union, was in Kyiv, when he advised Ukrainians to join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation, that he was proposing, and actually warned against suicidal nationalism. Those words, you know, are not remembered much now. People seem to think that Ukraine is free because of the end of the Cold War and the pressure of the West as one of the fruits of victory in the Cold War. This is simply incorrect. It turns history upside down.
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union represents more than a geopolitical watershed; as time passes, historians will increasingly see it as the end of an intellectual era as well. Leninism is in worldwide retreat, with few serious defenders. But for most of this unhappy century a disappointingly large number of Western intellectuals viewed the Soviet system as a plausible alternative to the Western model. To be sure, few supported the vast crimes of Stalin, but many made careful, casuistic distinctions between his evil misrule and the alleged humanism of Lenin's original Bolshevism.
  • Whether the Soviet Union was an empire or not—the debate on this still continues—it died the death of an empire, splitting along lines roughly defined by ethnic and linguistic boundaries.
    • Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014)
  • I will recall once more Russia's most recent history. Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself. Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country's integrity. Oligarchic groups — possessing absolute control over information channels — served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere. Many thought or seemed to think at the time that our young democracy was not a continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse, the prolonged agony of the Soviet system. But they were mistaken. That was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.
  • The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes an epochal change in the way people live. More important, it liberates the way people think. We see with new clarity that centralized government bureaucracies created in this century are not the wave of the future. Never again will people trust planners and paper shufflers more than they trust themselves. We all watched as the statue of Soviet hangman Feliks Dzherzhinsky was toppled in front of Moscow's KGB headquarters by the very people his evil empire sought to enslave. Its sightless eyes symbolized the moral blindness of totalitarians around the world. They could never see the indomitable spirit of people determined to be free from government control—free to build a better future with their own heads, hands, and hearts.
  • So, why did the USSR collapse? Because Gorbachev unleashed a process he couldn't control and never understood. Because hardliners tried to stop him. And because liberals decided it suited their purposes to smash the union and have an independent Russia. In short, almost everyone involved in politics at the time played a part. Pointing the finger at any individual group seems rather pointless. Ultimately, though, if you really want to find someone to blame, the true culprits were the Bolsheviks who built the Soviet system. The communist model was fatally flawed from the start. With hindsight, it seems clear that, sooner or later, it was bound to come crashing down.
  • In 1989 this communist order was removed from the face of Europe. In 1991 the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. Although China still claimed to be communist, its fundamental economic reforms meant that this was no longer accurate as a comprehensive description. Communist parties clung on to office in a few countries such as North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba; their geopolitical importance was a long way short of the power and prestige of the ‘world communist movement’ in its years of pomp. Communism was fast becoming a historical relic. Such a transformation brought an end to the struggle known as the Cold War. This was predominantly a conflict between coalitions led by the USSR and the USA, and the Soviet disintegration in December 1991 signalled a definitive victory for the Americans. For years the Cold War had involved the nightmarish possibility of a nuclear strike by one side against the other. Unable to match American advances in the development and dissemination of technology, the Soviet Union had lost the military parity it had possessed. This was not the sole index of defeat. Throughout the contest between the superpowers the Americans had claimed to stand for the market economy, liberal democracy and civil society. Although the USA had often honoured these principles only in the breach, they were the principles widely thought to have triumphed when communism expired in eastern Europe and in the USSR. The West’s political leaders and commentators were proud and excited. Communism had been exposed as an overwhelmingly inferior kind of state order. Many believed that history had come to a close. Liberalism in its political, economic and social manifestations had consigned the ideology and practice of Leninism to the dustbin of the ages. The suggestion was that communism had been a puffball which too many people had walked around as if it was a great oak tree.
  • After the XX Congress, in an ultra-narrow circle of our closest friends and associates, we often discussed the problems of democratization of the country and society. We chose a simple – like a sledgehammer – method of propagating the "ideas" of late Lenin. A group of true, not imaginary reformers developed (of course, orally) the following plan: to strike with the authority of Lenin at Stalin, at Stalinism. And then, if successful, – to strike with Plekhanov and Social Democracy - at Lenin, and then – with liberalism and "moral socialism" – at revolutionarism in general... The Soviet totalitarian regime could be destroyed only through glasnost and totalitarian party discipline, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism. [...] Looking back, I can proudly say that a clever, but very simple tactic – the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism – has worked.
  • After I was elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, I committed one very important tactical blunder. I trusted Gorbachev. It seemed to me that an alliance with Gorbachev might become very important in stabilizing the situation both in the republics and in the country as a whole. And many people urged me on. Our joint work on the 500-day program brought the interests of a renewed union of republics and the center even closer together. Gorbachev had admitted publicly that the Shatalin-Iavlinskii program looked very interesting and promising to him. It seemed to me that all we had to do was take one more step, and we could walk together onto the road which would lead us out of the crisis. But that didn’t happen. He suddenly changed his position drastically, and the 500-day program collapsed, burying any hopes with it for a way out of the impasse. Instead of breaking with Gorbachev and firmly divorcing myself from the president’s policies of half steps, half measures, and half reforms, I fell prey to the illusion that we could still reach an agreement. But, as it turned out, it was impossible to make an agreement with a president who is simultaneously the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party and to whom the interests of the party caste and the party elite will always take precedence over any other interests. And so we lost four months. We didn’t get anywhere by supporting Moscow indirectly by our silence. On February 19, in a live broadcast on Central Television, I had enough courage to tell the viewers that I was dissociating myself from Gorbachev’s policies. It would have been impossible and immoral for me to continue to watch without a murmur while the current leadership dragged the country toward chaos and catastrophe by trying to preserve the rotten system.
  • Regardless of the reasons given for his removal, we are dealing with a rightist, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup. Despite all the difficulties and severe trials being experienced by the people, the democratic process in the country is acquiring an increasingly broad sweep and an irreversible character. The peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny. The uncontrolled powers of unconstitutional organs have been considerably limited, and this includes party organs.
  • The Soviet economic crisis played a central and often underestimated role in the last three years of Soviet history. In conjunction with revelations of past communist crimes, it contributed to mass discontent and mobilization against central authority... The purposeful as well as unintended destruction of the Soviet economy, along with its finances, may be considered the best candidate as a principal cause of Soviet disintegration.
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