THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION (1989-1991) AND CAUSES OF THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSE.MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS THE LAST PRESIDENT IN THE  SOVIET UNION ERA (1985 - 1991).BORIS YELTSIN AND THE DEMISE OF THE SOVIET UNION ,BRAVERY IN FACING DOWN THE COUP LEADERS TRANSFORMED HIM INTO A NATIONAL LEADER.

Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, and President Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in the White House on Dec. 8, 1987.When I became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, I felt during my very first meetings with people that what worried them the most was the problem of war and peace. Do everything in order to prevent war, Gorbachev said.

The USSR officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 changed the world’s geopolitical balance. When the Soviet Union fell, it ended the tenure of a superpower with the resources of more than a dozen countries. The fall left its largest component, Russia, unable to wield anything like the global clout that the Soviet Union had for decades. The concluding drama of the Cold War  the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the end of the four-decade-old East-West conflict unfolded in three acts between 1989 and 1991.Since then, debates have raged over just what brought the end of the arms race, the seemingly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Some have argued that Reagan’s SDI and his hard-line approach to communism turned the tide, but SDI was confined to the drawing board and Reagan moderated his approach considerably after 1983.The Bolshevik Revolution triumphed on 07 November 1917 (October 25 old calendar), when the Bolsheviks dispersed the Provisional Government from the Winter Palace in Petrograd. On 03 March 1918, Soviet government officials signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, relinquishing Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland, and Ukraine to German control and giving up a portion of the Caucasus region to Turkey. And the monarchical cause was effectively killed when Communists shot the imperial family in July 1918.But by the spring of 1918, elements dissatisfied with the Communists established centers of resistance in southern and Siberian Russia against the Communist-controlled area. These anti-Communist White armies enjoyed, to varying degrees, the support of the Allied Powers. Desiring to defeat Germany in any way possible, Britain, France, and the United States landed troops in Russia and provided logistical support to the Whites, whom the Allies trusted to resume Russia's struggle against Germany after overthrowing the Communist regime. After the Allies defeated Germany in November 1918, they opted to continue their intervention in the Russian Civil War against the Communists in the interests of averting world socialist revolution.By 1919 Soviet Russia had shrunk to the size of sixteenth-century Muscovy, but the Red Army had the advantage of defending the heartland with Moscow at its center. The White armies, divided geographically and without a clearly defined cause, went down in defeat one by one. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks had to deal with struggles for independence in regions that it had given up under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which the regime immediately repudiated after Germany's defeat by the Allies in November 1918). By force of arms, the Communists established Soviet republics in Belorussia (January 1919), Ukraine (March 1919), Azerbaydzhan (April 1920), Armenia (November 1920), and Georgia (March 1921), but they were unable to win back the Baltic region, where the independent states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been founded shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. In December 1917, during a civil war between Finnish Reds and Whites, the Soviet government recognized the independence of Finland. Poland, reborn after World War I, fought a successful war with Soviet Russia from April 1920 to March 1921 over the location of the frontier between the two states.During its struggle for survival, the Soviet state placed great hopes on revolution's breaking out in the industrialized countries. To coordinate the socialist movement under Soviet auspices, Lenin founded the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. Although no successful socialist revolutions occurred elsewhere immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern provided the Communist leadership with the means through which they later controlled foreign communist parties. By the end of 1920, the Communists had clearly triumphed in the Civil War. The Allied governments, lacking support for intervention from their war-weary citizenry, withdrew most of their forces by 1920. The last foreign troops departed Siberia in 1922, leaving the Soviet state unchallenged from abroad.The end of World War II saw the Soviet Union emerge as one of the world's two great military powers. Its battle-tested forces occupied most of postwar Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union won island holdings from Japan and further concessions from Finland (which had joined in the German invasion in 1941) in addition to the territories the Soviet Union had seized as a consequence of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. But these achievements had been bought at a high cost. An estimated 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians perished in the war, the heaviest loss of life of any of the combatant countries.Between November 1945 and December 1946, a number of the coalition governments established in the Eastern European countries occupied by Soviet troops during the war transformed into Communist "People's Republics" with strong ties to the Soviet Union. These included Yugoslavia (November 1945); Albania (January 1946); and Bulgaria (December 1946). The United States and Britain considered this an abrogation of agreements made at the Yalta Conference. During a speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, visiting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proclaimed that Europe was divided by an "Iron Curtain" as the nations of Eastern Europe fell increasingly under Soviet control. Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia all fell under Communist control by early 1948.

Gorbachev Blames 'Greedy' Russian, Ukrainian Leaders For 1991 Soviet Collapse.Russian President Boris Yeltsin (right) and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev touch hands during Gorbachev's address to the extraordinary meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation in Moscow in August 1991.Mikhail Gorbachev has blamed the late Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other politicians for the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, saying that their hunger for power destroyed the country.

Anti-Soviet popular uprisings began in Budapest and spread throughout Hungary in the autumn of 1956. On November 2, Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, who had already promised the Hungarians free elections, denounced the Warsaw Pact and asked for United Nations support. On November 4, Soviet forces moved into Hungary and suppressed the revolt. Soviet, Polish, East German, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops invaded Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968, and deposed the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek, who had begun a program of economic and political liberalization (the "Prague spring").The Brezhnev Doctrine was the Soviet Union's declared policy to intervene in the internal affairs of another socialist state if the leading role of that state's communist party was threatened. It was formulated as justification for the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.Faced with a deteriorating security situation, on 24 December 1979, large numbers of Soviet airborne forces, joining thousands of Soviet troops already on the ground, began to land in Kabul under the pretext of a field exercise. On 26 December 1979, these invasion forces installed Babrak Karmal as Prime Minister. The Karmal regime, although backed by an expeditionary force that grew as large as 120,000 Soviet troops, was unable to establish authority outside Kabul. As much as 80% of the countryside eluded effective government control. Afghan freedom fighters (mujahidin) made it almost impossible for the regime to maintain a system of local government outside major urban centers. Poorly armed at first, by 1984 the mujahidin began receiving substantial assistance in the form of weapons and training from the US and other outside powers.Mikhail S. Gorbachev entered office in March 1985 determined to scrap old assumptions about Soviet foreign policy. He had drawn lessons from the return of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s and they scared him. The "old thinking" believed that the USSR would emerge victorious in the Cold War if it continued building up its arsenal and fostering "progressive" regimes in the Third World in places like Angola, Ethiopia, and especially Afghanistan. Gorbachev's "new thinking" sought to reorganize and revitalize the Soviet system; but to do so required a favorable international situation to relieve the material burden of arms competition with the West.The first step in the end of the Cold War came when Mikhail S. Gorbachev implicitly abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine. On 14 April 1988, the Governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the United States and Soviet Union serving as guarantors, signed an agreement known as the Geneva accords. This included five major documents, which, among other things, establishe a timetable that ensured full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by 15 February 1989. Gorbachev demanded that the retreat be orderly and dignified -- he didn't want television images reminiscent of the chaotic 1975 US pullout from Vietnam. "We must not appear before the world in our underwear or even without any," he told the Politburo inner circle. "A defeatist position is not possible." The withdrawal was intended as a sign of conciliation toward the West and reassurance to the East Europeans, but it encouraged others to challenge Soviet power.The second act of the drama began in the fall of 1989 with peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe (except Romania) and the fall of the Soviet "outer empire." Shortly after Poland's electorate voted the Communists out of government in June 1989, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would not interfere with the internal affairs of the Eastern European countries. By October, Hungary and Czechoslovakia followed Poland's example.On 09 November 1989, the East German Government opened the Berlin Wall. East Germany, the center of contention throughout the Cold War, was united with West Germany and integrated into NATO. As one historian noted, in Poland communism took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks, and in Czechoslovakia ten days to disappear. In Romania the bloody exception to the rule of peaceful transition  the end came with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact a year later plus the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe [that substantially reduced Soviet superiority in conventional forces in Europe] resulted in a stronger Western alliance -- so strong that the US could redeploy forces from Europe to the Persian Gulf for use against Iraq.The third and final act closed with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. By 1989 Gorbachev's domestic reforms had run into serious trouble, and the economy went into a tailspin. The centrifugal forces in the "outer empire" stimulated and accelerated those in the "inner empire", as the Soviet republics sought sovereignty and then independence. As the center disintegrated and Gorbachev opened up the political process with glasnost (openness), the old communist "barons" in the republics saw the handwriting on the wall and became nationalists; they "first of all attacked the USSR government  and subsequently destroyed the USSR." Asked when he decided to secede from the USSR, Ukrainian party boss Leonid Kravchuk replied: "1989" [he did so in mid-1990]. Each of the USSR's republics, as they declared independence or sovereignty, also adopted statements by the republic leaderships on service in the armed forces, including the creation of their own military forces.

Gorbachev's struggle with the old imperial elite in the communist party, the armed forces, and the military-industrial complex culminated in the August 1991 coup. When the failed, it finished off the USSR - and Gorbachev himself. Russia was one of the main initiators of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Because the former Soviet republics receiving independence was something that Russia wanted itself. On Christmas Day 1991, at 7:35 p.m., the Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin was lowered and replaced by the new Russian banner. The USSR officially ceased to exist on 31 December. The Cold War was over

The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-91 has often been heralded in the West as a triumph of capitalism and democracy, as though this event were obviously a direct result of the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments. This self-congratulatory analysis has little relation to measurable facts, circumstances, and internal political dynamics that were the real historical causes of the deterioration of the Soviet empire and ultimately the Soviet state itself. Fiery political speeches and tough diplomatic postures make good theater, but they are ineffective at forcing political transformation in totalitarian nations, as is proven by the persistence of far less powerful Communist regimes in Cuba and east Asia in the face of punishing trade embargos. The key to understanding the reasons for the demise of the Soviet Union is to be found not in the speeches or policies of Western politicians, but in internal Soviet history.The Soviet Union was already in decline as a world power well before 1980. Any illusions of global Communist hegemony had evaporated with the collapse of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1960s. As the Nixon administration improved American relations with an increasingly independent China, the Soviets saw a strategic need to scale down the nuclear arms race, which placed enormous strains on its faltering economy. The threat of a nuclear confrontation was reduced considerably by the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) and strategic arms limitation treaties (SALT) contracted with the Nixon administration in 1972. This détente, or easing of tensions, allowed Leonid Brezhnev to focus on domestic economic and social development, while boosting his political popularity.Around 1975, the Soviet Union entered a period of economic stagnation from which it would never emerge. Increasingly, the USSR looked to Europe, primarily West Germany, to provide hard currency financing through massive loans, while the U.S. became a major supplier of grain.Despite moments of anti-Communist grandstanding, the Americans and Western Europeans maintained trade relations with the cash-strapped Soviet Union, which dipped into its Stalin-era gold reserves to increase availability of consumer goods.Foreign trade and mild economic reforms were not enough to overcome the inefficiencies of the Soviet command economy, which remained technologically backward and full of corruption. Economic planners were frequently unable to diagnose and remedy problems, since they were given false reports by officials who only pretended to be productive. Soviet living standards remained poor by Western standards. By 1980, only 9 percent of Soviets had automobiles, which was actually a vast improvement under Brezhnev. Very little was computerized, due to state paranoia about the use of telecommunications for counterrevolutionary purposes. The USSR was able to endure this technological lag because its closed economy protected it from competition, but its ability to maintain military superiority increasingly depended on the ability to keep pace with Western modernization.In his radio broadcasts during the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan complained that the capitalist nations propped up the intrinsically flawed Soviet regime, instead of allowing it to naturally collapse from its own inefficiency and inhumanity. In contrast to his later hagiographers, Reagan did not envision defeating the Soviet Union by forceful action, but instead he perceived that the regime would collapse from its own failings once the West removed its financial life support system. It is this early Reagan, far more thoughtful than he is generally credited, who proved to be most astute in diagnosing the state of the USSR. It did not need a foreign enemy to “defeat” it, for it was deteriorating from within.Major reforms of the stagnant command economy and corrupt political structure were not possible as long as the Brezhnev era old guard remained in control. After Brezhnev died in November 1982, he was succeeded by former KGB head Yuri Andropov, who died in early 1984. By then, Brezhnev’s de facto second-in-command, Konstantin Chernenko, was already in failing health when he took over the Communist Party.Chernenko died in March 1985, and was immediately succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, a favorite of Andropov. Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo at age fifty-four, a refreshing contrast with the gerontocracy that preceded him. Although he was a devout Marxist, Gorbachev had a history of independent thinking, and had been educated in Western political theory from Aquinas to Rousseau. He had always been a demanding manager, and he now appreciated the need for serious reform in order to halt the economic decline of the USSR, which threatened both its domestic and foreign policy objectives.Gorbachev immediately proposed a “restructuring” perestroika of the economy, with little in the way of concrete reforms. His initial thinking appeared to be that a purely technical improvement in economic planning was needed to solve the Soviet Union’s economic woes. By February 1986, Gorbachev was announcing the need for “radical reform,” but still without specifics.

His presidency was marked by unprecedented freedom of speech, the press was free to say and write whatever they wanted. Never before or after has Russia known such freedom of speech. In this regards he behaved like a true democrate.He also managed to normalize the relations with Western Europe and USA. He wasn’t treated as an equal by them, but he swallowed his pride because the country desperately needed international financial aid and couldn’t afford to participate in arms race anymore.The Yeltsin years were perhaps the most disastrous in Russia's 20th-century history, and that's saying something. It provided further proof, as if we needed any, that an opposition street fighter can break an awful lot of things if you put one in office.

President Boris Yeltsin, who hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union by scrambling atop a tank to rally opposition against a hardline coup and later pushed Russia to embrace democracy. The first freely elected leader of Russia, Yeltsin was initially admired abroad for his defiance of the monolithic Communist system. But many Russians will remember him mostly for presiding over the steep decline of their nation.Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, summed up Yeltsin’s complex legacy today by referring to him as one “on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors. Yeltsin soared to popularity in the Communist era on pledges to fight corruption, but he proved unable or unwilling to prevent the looting of state industry as it moved into private hands during his nine years in power.Yeltsin steadfastly defended freedom of the press, but was a master at manipulating the media. His hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has proven far more popular even as he has tightened Kremlin control.Yeltsin’s career was punctuated by bizarre behaviour that the public chalked up to alcohol. Red-faced pranks, missed appointments, and inarticulate and contradictory public comments were blamed by aides on jet lag, medication or illness. After Communist hardliners tried to overthrow Gorbachev and roll back democratic reforms in 1991 by sending armour into the streets, Yeltsin climbed atop a tank to rally resistance. He spearheaded the peaceful end of the Soviet state by the end of the year.Ill with heart problems and facing possible defeat by a Communist challenger in 1996, Yeltsin marshalled his energy to win re-election. The challenge transformed the shaky convalescent into the spry, dancing candidate.But Yeltsin was an inconsistent reformer who never took much interest in the mundane tasks of government and he blamed subordinates for Russia’s many problems. He damaged his democratic credentials by using force to solve political disputes, although he said it was necessary to hold the country together.Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born Feb. 1, 1931, into a peasant family in the Ural Mountains’ Sverdlovsk region. When he was three, his father was imprisoned in dictator Josef Stalin’s purges but later released.A mischievous child, Yeltsin lost his thumb and index finger while playing with a grenade. He was expelled from elementary school for criticizing a teacher at an assembly.Yeltsin joined the Communist Party at age 30 after a brief career in construction in the city of Sverdlovsk, now called Yekaterinburg. He became the region’s party boss in 1976.In 1985, Gorbachev brought Yeltsin to Moscow, where he shook up the city’s party hierarchy. The strapping, silver-haired Yeltsin cut a popular figure, using buses instead of a limousine, standing in long lines in stores and loudly demanding why managers stashed away food instead of selling it to ordinary customers.For many Russians, he had the unpolished charm of a “muzhik”  a tough peasant with common sense and a fondness for vodka.A bitter rivalry grew between him and the more cautious Gorbachev. When Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev at a party meeting in 1987, the Soviet leader fired him, and he reportedly was hospitalized with heart problems.He stormed back to power in 1989, winning a parliamentary seat in the first real election in 70 years. The following year, Yeltsin quit the party.Yeltsin won Russia’s first popular presidential election in a landslide in June 1991. Russia still was part of the Soviet Union, but the central government had started ceding power to the 15 republics.Kremlin hardliners trying to stop that process launched the failed coup in August, putting Gorbachev under house arrest, but Yeltsin led protests by the democratic opposition in Moscow and the putsch fell apart.Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and confiscated its vast property. He and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus formed the Commonwealth of Independent States in December 1991, declaring the Soviet Union extinct. Gorbachev resigned within the month.As president, Yeltsin guaranteed free speech, private property and multi-party elections, and opened the borders to trade and travel.He quickly launched economic reforms that freed prices, created a private sector and allowed foreign investment, but inflation skyrocketed and production plummeted. Millions were impoverished when wages and pensions went unpaid for months. He later said he regretted believing “that we could overcome everything in one spurt.”Tensions with the Soviet-era parliament climaxed in fall 1993 when Yeltsin disbanded it. An armed standoff and street riots followed, and he turned tanks against the parliament building. Scores of people were killed.Yeltsin later pushed through a constitution that guaranteed a strong presidency, but he also dumped key reformers from his cabinet, alienating democratic forces.In December 1994, Yeltsin launched a war against separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya. Tens of thousands of people were killed, and a humiliated Russian army withdrew at the end of 1996  only to return there in 1999.He fired the entire government four times in 1998 and 1999. The economy sank into a deep recession in 1998, but he easily faced down an impeachment attempt by the Communist-dominated lower chamber of parliament in 1999.In foreign policy, he assured independence for Russia’s Soviet-era satellites, oversaw troop and arms reductions, and developed warm relations with western leaders.But he also struggled to preserve a role for the former superpower to offset U.S. global clout, and in 1999, he sent Russian troops to Kosovo ahead of NATO peacekeepers  to show that Moscow would not be elbowed out of European affairs.He was hospitalized with heart disease in 1995 and was deeply unpopular ahead of presidential elections in June 1996. He rallied by manipulating the media and enlisting the aid of the so-called oligarchs who had enriched themselves on the spoils of the Soviet economy.Yeltsin won, but the campaign took a heavy physical toll, and doctors later said he had suffered another heart attack. He underwent quintuple bypass surgery in November 1996. He also had back problems, and seemed increasingly shaky  both physically and mentally  in his final years in office.Joint Press Conference with President Clinton and President Yeltsin on the porch of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. October 23, 1995.Upon his inauguration in January 1993, President Bill Clinton became the first president since Franklin Roosevelt who did not need a strategy for the Cold War and the first since William Howard Taft who did not need a policy for the Soviet Union.Like many of his predecessors, Bill Clinton tended to view relations with other countries through the prism of personality. In this case, Russia was personified by its President, Boris Yeltsin. Clinton was strongly inclined not only to like Yeltsin but also to support his policies, in particular, his commitment to Russian democracy. During the seven years both were in office, “Bill and Boris” met eighteen times, nearly as often as their predecessors had met throughout the entire Cold War. For his first trip abroad, Clinton met Yeltsin in Vancouver in April 1993. At the time, and periodically throughout his term in office, Yeltsin faced growing opposition at home to his efforts to liberalize the economy and enact democratic reforms in Russia.But events on the ground increasingly threatened to undermine bilateral relations and, in 1995, relations were more strained. Clinton objected to Russian military intervention in the autonomous region of Chechnya, including the siege of Grozny, which began in January 1995; the United States was concerned too with Russia's sale of nuclear reactors to Iran, which might use the technology for the pursuit of nuclear weapons rather than civilian pruposes.ated from Communism and heading towards a bright future. He left it as an impoverished, corrupt hell, ruled by gangsters andthieving oligarchs, with an economy smaller than Argentina’s and a rusting mess of a military.Yeltsin failed. His US - backed attempts to make neo-liberal reforms .Russia was particulary concerned about the expansion of the NATO in countries of the former Warsaw Pact and in Russia's traditional sphere of influence and Yeltsin objected to U.S. military intervention in Bosnia against the Serbs, Moscow's traditional allies.Their differences set the stage for a combative summit and the US newspapers anticipated their clashes.Boris Yeltsin was the most incompetent leader Russia has had in the last century. He became President when the country was libekfired massively. The Russian economy decreased by over 80% during Yeltsin’s reign. The ruble crashed. The privatisation ensured state industries such as oil were sold to Yeltsin’s cronies at obscenely low prices. Corruption became endemic. Welfare programs were essentially cancelled and people starved while Yeltsin and his drinking buddies partied and embezzled money. The military fell from being the world’s strongest to being a laughing stock. Yeltsin invited thousands of Western investors into the country to try and attract foreign investment. They became a catalyst for the massive embezzlement and the largely criminal acquisition of state assets.

Joint Press Conference with President Clinton and President Yeltsin on the porch of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. October 23, 1995.The reform Yeltsin’s government launched that aimed to redistribute state property amongst all Russians equally was badly executed, people were not informed properly in advance of what they could do with the special certificates given to them by the state which actually enabled them to buy small shares of any company or factory that was being privatized by the state at the time.