Who Saw the Collapse of the USSR Coming?
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, we asked historians, economists and political analysts why it happened, and what lessons it holds for Russia’s future.
Goodbye to all that: Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Andrei Gromyko, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and Yegor Ligachev, a member of the Politburo, greet the 1986 May Day demonstration in Red Square atop the Lenin Mausoleum.
Photographer: TASS/TASSOn Dec. 25, 1991, unable to overcome the blow dealt by a hardline coup months earlier and by independence movements in Soviet republics, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. The last Soviet leader wanted to reform communism, not replace it, but he was unable to contain the centrifugal forces his reforms had unleashed. The USSR, ailing and dismembered, came to an end.
“The old system collapsed before the new one had time to begin working,” he said in his final address, calling on Russia to preserve its hard-earned democratic freedoms. At Russia’s helm, Boris Yeltsin instead revived a system of personal power that has endured.