Factors leading to collapse of Soviet Communism and Soviet Union, 1985-1991

Factors Leading to the Collapse of Soviet Communism and the Soviet Union, 1985–1991

History Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 4500+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

The collapse of Soviet communism and the disintegration of the USSR between 1985 and 1991 is one of the most significant turning points of twentieth-century world history and a recurring theme in UPSC History Optional’s World History paper. The story begins with the renewed superpower confrontation of the Second Cold War, runs through the costly Soviet war in Afghanistan and the challenge posed by Poland’s Solidarity movement, and culminates in Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of perestroika and glasnost, the Revolutions of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. This article traces these internal and external pressures in sequence, showing how military overreach, economic stagnation, and a loosening of political control combined to bring down one of the twentieth century’s two superpowers.

The Second Cold War (1979–85)

• The term Second Cold War refers to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which tensions greatly increased between the major powers, with both sides becoming more militaristic.
  • US President Reagan went all out to fight the Second Cold War by supporting counterinsurgencies in the Third World; the intensity of this “Second” Cold War was as great as its duration was short.
  • The early 1980s saw further elevated tension, marked by the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983) and the “Able Archer” NATO military exercises (1983).
  • The United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressure on the Soviet Union at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation.

Soviet War in Afghanistan

• In April 1978, the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in the Saur Revolution.
  • Within months, opponents of the communist government launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that expanded into a civil war waged by guerrilla mujahideen against government forces countrywide.
  • The Peshawar Seven insurgents (Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance) received military training and weapons in neighbouring Pakistan and China, along with weapons and billions of dollars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA government.
  • Meanwhile, friction between the PDPA’s competing factions — the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham — led to the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers.
  • By mid-1979, the United States had started a covert programme to assist the mujahideen.
• In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency; distrusted by the Soviets, Amin himself was assassinated by Soviet special forces in December 1979.
  • A Soviet-organised government led by Parcham’s Babrak Karmal, but inclusive of both factions, filled the vacuum, and Soviet troops were deployed in more substantial numbers to stabilise Afghanistan under Karmal — directly drawing the Soviets into what had been a domestic war.
• US President Carter responded to the Soviet intervention by withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposing embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, demanding a significant increase in military spending, and announcing that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.
• The Afghan War quickly settled into a stalemate, with more than 100,000 Soviet troops controlling the cities, larger towns, and major garrisons, while the mujahideen moved with relative freedom throughout the countryside.
  • Soviet troops tried various tactics to crush the insurgency, but the guerrillas generally eluded their attacks; the Soviets then attempted to eliminate the mujahideen’s civilian support base by bombing and depopulating rural areas, sparking a massive flight from the countryside.
  • The mujahideen eventually neutralised Soviet air power through shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles supplied by the United States.
• The war became a quagmire for what, by the late 1980s, was a disintegrating Soviet Union — the Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured.
  • Despite failing to install a sympathetic regime in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union signed an accord with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in 1988, agreeing to withdraw its troops; the withdrawal was completed on 15 February 1989.
  • Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the war would be brief, Muslim guerrillas — aided by the US and other countries — waged fierce resistance, and the Kremlin’s deployment of nearly 100,000 troops in support of its puppet regime led many outside observers to dub the conflict “the Soviets’ Vietnam.”
  • Moscow’s quagmire in Afghanistan proved far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans, since the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis within the Soviet system — indeed, the invasion itself had resulted in part from that domestic crisis.

Reagan, Thatcher, and the Anti-Communist Offensive

• Four years before becoming president, Ronald Reagan bluntly stated: “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.”
  • In 1980, Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere; both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology.
• By early 1985, Reagan’s anti-communist position had developed into the Reagan Doctrine, which, in addition to containment, asserted an additional right to subvert existing communist governments.
  • Besides continuing Carter’s policy of supporting the Islamic opponents of the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Afghanistan, the CIA also sought to weaken the Soviet Union itself by promoting political Islam in the majority-Muslim Central Asian Soviet Union.
  • The CIA encouraged anti-communist Pakistan’s ISI to train Muslims from around the world to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union.

The Polish Solidarity Movement and Martial Law

• Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; his 1979 visit to his native Poland stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centred on the Solidarity movement that galvanised opposition.
  • Solidarity, a Polish trade union, was formally founded on 22 September 1980, when delegates of 36 regional trade unions met in Gdańsk and united under the Solidarity banner, electing Wałęsa as chairman. It was the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country not controlled by the Communist Party, and its membership reached 10 million — representing most of Poland’s workforce by early 1981.
  • Solidarity was a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement that used the methods of civil resistance to advance workers’ rights and social change; a separate agricultural union of private farmers, Rural Solidarity, was founded in Warsaw on 14 December 1980.
• Throughout 1981, the government led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski was confronted by an increasingly assertive Solidarity, which staged controlled strikes to back its appeals for economic reforms, free elections, and greater trade union involvement in decision-making — its positions hardening as the moderate Wałęsa came under pressure from more militant unionists.
  • Jaruzelski’s government faced severe Soviet pressure to suppress Solidarity, but for the first time, the Soviet Union abstained from military intervention, unlike on earlier occasions such as the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 — leaving the Polish leadership to impose martial law on its own.
    • Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin’s top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders against intervening if Poland fell under Solidarity’s control, fearing this could invite heavy economic sanctions and prove catastrophic for the Soviet economy.
  • On 13 December 1981, Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland to crush the movement: Solidarity was declared illegal and its leaders arrested, prompting Reagan to impose economic sanctions on Poland. The union was formally dissolved by parliament on 8 October 1982, but continued as an underground organisation; martial law was lifted in 1983, though many political prisoners were not released until the general amnesty of 1986.
• A new wave of strikes and labour unrest spread across Poland in 1988, with government recognition of Solidarity prominent among the strikers’ demands.
  • In April 1989, the government agreed to legalise Solidarity and allow it to contest free elections to a bicameral Polish parliament. In the elections held that June, Solidarity-endorsed candidates won 99 of 100 seats in the newly formed Senate and all 161 of the 460 total seats in the Sejm that opposition candidates were entitled to contest.

Soviet and US Military Build-Up and Economic Strain

• By the early 1980s, the USSR had built a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter began massively building up the US military — a build-up subsequently accelerated by the Reagan administration into the largest peacetime defence buildup in American history.
  • Tensions intensified further as Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer programme (cancelled under Carter), installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars,” which proposed ground- and space-based systems to shoot down incoming strategic nuclear ballistic missiles in mid-flight — shifting focus from the earlier strategic-offense doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) to strategic defence.
  • Against this backdrop of rising tension and the deployment of Soviet ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, NATO, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, decided to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily in West Germany — placing missiles just 10 minutes’ striking distance from Moscow.
• After Reagan’s military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond in kind, since enormous military expenses, combined with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivised agriculture, were already a heavy burden on the Soviet economy.
  • At the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production even as other non-OPEC nations raised output, contributing to the 1980s oil glut — a severe blow to the Soviet Union, since oil was its main source of export revenue.
  • Issues with command economics, falling oil prices, and heavy military expenditure gradually pushed the Soviet economy toward stagnation.
• On 1 September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing all 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, after it violated Soviet airspace — an act Reagan characterised as a “massacre” that increased public support for military deployment.
  • The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, has been called the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the closely watching Soviet leadership considered a nuclear attack to be imminent.
• Persistent US domestic wariness about foreign intervention, a legacy of the Vietnam War, led the Reagan administration to favour quick, low-cost counter-insurgency tactics.
  • In 1983, the administration intervened in the multi-sided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya, and backed the Central American Contras — anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While the Grenada and Libya interventions proved popular domestically, backing the Contras was mired in controversy.
• The Soviets, meanwhile, incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions: although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Afghan war would be brief, the Kremlin’s deployment of nearly 100,000 troops in support of its Afghan puppet regime made the conflict Moscow’s own “Vietnam” — one that proved even more disastrous, since it coincided with a deepening internal decay of the Soviet system itself.

Final Years (1985–91)

• In the mid-1980s, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, introduced the liberalising reforms of perestroika (“reorganisation”) and glasnost (“openness”) and ended Soviet involvement in Afghanistan.
  • Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, and Gorbachev refused to use Soviet troops to bolster faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past.
  • The result, in 1989, was a wave of revolutions that peacefully — with the exception of the Romanian Revolution — overthrew all the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.
  • The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991, leading to the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist regimes in other countries such as Mongolia, Cambodia, and South Yemen. The United States remained the world’s only superpower.

Gorbachev’s Reforms: Perestroika and Glasnost

• By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and facing a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings due to declining oil prices — issues that prompted him to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.
• Perestroika (Restructuring): After an ineffectual start, Gorbachev concluded that deeper structural change was necessary and, in June 1987, announced an agenda of economic and political reform called perestroika.
  • Seeking to bring the Soviet Union up to economic par with capitalist countries such as Germany, Japan, and the United States, Gorbachev decentralised economic controls and encouraged enterprises to become self-financing.
  • Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses, and paved the way for foreign investment, redirecting resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive civilian areas — though the economic bureaucracy, fearing the loss of its power and privileges, obstructed much of the programme.
  • Gorbachev also proposed reducing the Communist Party leadership’s direct involvement in governance while increasing local governments’ authority. In 1988, a new parliament, the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, was created, with similar congresses established in each Soviet republic; for the first time, elections to these bodies offered voters a choice of candidates, including non-communists, even as the Communist Party continued to dominate the system.
  • Perestroika is often argued to be the cause of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War. Despite initial Western scepticism, Gorbachev proved genuinely committed to reversing the Soviet Union’s deteriorating economic condition rather than continuing the arms race with the West.
• Glasnost (Openness):Glasnost was the Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues, marking the beginning of the Soviet Union’s democratisation.
  • Partly as a way to fend off internal opposition from party cliques, Gorbachev introduced glasnost alongside perestroika, increasing freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions; it was intended to reduce corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power within the Central Committee.
  • Ultimately, glasnost brought about fundamental changes to the Soviet political structure: the Communist Party’s power was reduced, multi-candidate elections took place, and criticism of government officials was permitted. It also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the Western world, particularly the United States, contributing to accelerating détente between the two nations.
• The “Common European Home”: Gorbachev presented this concept during a visit to Czechoslovakia in April 1987. In his main address in Prague, he declared: “We assign an overriding significance to the European course of our foreign policy…. We are resolutely against the division of the continent into military blocs facing each other, against the accumulation of military arsenals in Europe, against everything that is the source of the threat of war. In the spirit of the new thinking we introduced the idea of the ‘all-European house.'”

Thaw in US–Soviet Relations

• In response to the Soviet Union’s military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling back of the arms race, setting in motion a series of Reagan–Gorbachev summits.
• The Geneva Summit (1985) — first summit: Held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland, this first meeting produced a joint statement proposing a 50 percent reduction in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals.
• The Reykjavík Summit (1986) — second summit: Held in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 11–12 October 1986, this meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev aimed to explore limiting each country’s strategic nuclear weapons and build momentum in ongoing arms-control negotiations.
  • The summit almost produced a sweeping arms-control agreement to dismantle the nuclear weapons of both sides; although no final agreement was reached, many historians and officials — including Gorbachev himself — later considered it a turning point in the Cold War.
  • Reagan had long been committed to opposing the Soviet Union at every opportunity, and the White House believed American supremacy was key to US survival, calculating that an accelerated arms race would cause irreparable harm to a faltering Soviet economy; as Reagan came to be perceived as an extremist hard-liner bent on the Soviet Union’s destruction, he attended the summit partly to allay such fears.
  • Gorbachev, for his part, based his presidency on the dual reform programmes of perestroika and glasnost; with the Soviet economy and industrial infrastructure faltering under an outmoded system, drastic restructuring was needed to compete with the West, but Gorbachev could not pursue reform without security assurances — making an arms-limitation treaty essential.
  • During the exchange of proposals, the two leaders agreed that nuclear weapons must be eliminated and nearly produced an agreement to eliminate the Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles by the year 2000. This was ultimately blocked by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI): Reagan refused to confine SDI research and technology to the laboratory, while Gorbachev would accept nothing less than a ban on missile testing in space. Despite this failure, both sides considered the meeting a success that opened the way for further progress.
• The Washington Summit (1987) — third summit: Reagan and Gorbachev discussed regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Central America, and Southern Africa, arms control for chemical and conventional weapons, the status of START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) negotiations, and human rights.
  • The summit’s notable accomplishment was the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres, along with their infrastructure.
• The Moscow Summit (1988) — fourth summit: Reagan and Gorbachev finalised the INF Treaty following the US Senate’s ratification in May 1988, and continued discussions on Central America, Southern Africa, the Middle East, the pending withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and human rights.
  • The two sides signed seven agreements on lesser issues such as student exchanges and fishing rights; a notable outcome was the updating of Soviet history books, which required the cancellation of some history classes in Soviet secondary schools.
• The Malta Summit (1989): This meeting between US President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev took place between 2–3 December 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall — their second meeting, following one that had included Reagan, held in New York in December 1988.
  • No agreements were signed at Malta; its main purpose was to let the two superpowers discuss the rapid changes taking place in Europe with the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and the summit is viewed by some observers as marking the official end of the Cold War.
  • Bush expressed support for Gorbachev’s perestroika initiative and other reforms within the Communist bloc, and both leaders announced a sizeable reduction in troop levels across Europe, with weapons reductions to form the main agenda of a further meeting scheduled for June 1990.
  • Gorbachev later reflected: “The Malta Summit in 1989 was so important, that if it had not taken place, the world out there would be unrecognisable to the one we live in today.”
• Late on 31 July 1991, Gorbachev and Bush signed the START I arms control treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms).

East Europe Breaks Away: The Revolutions of 1989

• It became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troop levels, represented a substantial economic drain, and the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant. The Soviets officially declared they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Central and Eastern Europe, and in 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
  • By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power as grassroots organisations such as Poland’s Solidarity movement rapidly gained ground.
• The Revolutions of 1989 — sometimes called the Autumn of Nations — were part of a revolutionary wave that brought the Fall of Communism to the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, beginning in Poland and continuing in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.
  • A common feature across most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance demonstrating popular opposition to one-party rule. Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country whose people overthrew their Communist regime violently — going on to execute its head of state — and attitudes had shifted enough that US Secretary of State James Baker suggested Washington would not oppose Soviet intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent bloodshed.
  • The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 failed to stimulate major political change in China, but the powerful images of defiance they produced helped spark a precipitation of events elsewhere in the globe.
  • On 4 June, Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in a partially free election in Poland, leading to the peaceful fall of communism there. Around the same time, Hungary physically dismantled its section of the Iron Curtain, triggering a mass exodus of East Germans through Hungary that destabilised East Germany — setting off mass demonstrations in cities such as Leipzig and, subsequently, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990.
  • In sum, the 1989 revolutionary wave peacefully overthrew the Soviet-style communist states of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria; Romania alone toppled its regime through violence.

Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unification

• In 1989, a series of radical political changes swept the Eastern Bloc, tied to the liberalisation of its authoritarian systems and the erosion of political power in the pro-Soviet governments of nearby Poland and Hungary; the swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was triggered by the decay of these other communist regimes and of the Soviet Union itself.
  • German reunification was the 1990 process by which the GDR (East Germany) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) to form a reunited nation, with Berlin reuniting into a single city.
• The East German regime began to falter in May 1989, when Hungary’s removal of its border fence opened a hole in the Iron Curtain, causing thousands of East Germans to flee to West Germany and Austria via Hungary, while thousands of others sought asylum in West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, demanding to emigrate.
  • At the end of September 1989, Genscher, West Germany’s foreign minister, arranged for their passage to the West, but another wave of refugees soon took their place, while mass demonstrations in Leipzig and other East German cities defied the authorities and demanded reform.
  • In an effort to halt this deterioration, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Politburo deposed Honecker in mid-October and replaced him with another hard-liner, Egon Krenz, who sought to stem the embarrassing flow of refugees through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
• On the evening of 9 November, communist functionary Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced at a televised news conference that East Germans would have unlimited passage to West Germany, effective “immediately.”
  • Although the government had actually intended to require exit visas during normal working hours, the announcement was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall that evening; crowds gathered and demanded to pass into West Berlin, and unprepared border guards let them through.
  • In a night of revelry, tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points and celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners; over the following weeks, euphoric crowds chipped away parts of the wall — the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
• The opening of the Wall proved fatal for the GDR. As ever-larger demonstrations demanded a voice in government, Krenz was replaced in mid-November by reform-minded communist Hans Modrow, who promised free, multiparty elections.
  • When balloting took place in March 1990, the SED — renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) — suffered a crushing defeat; the eastern counterpart of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union, which had pledged speedy reunification, emerged as the largest party in East Germany’s first democratically elected People’s Chamber.
  • A new East German government headed by Lothar de Maizière, a longtime Christian Democratic Union member, began negotiations for a treaty of unification, with a surging tide of refugees from East to West Germany adding urgency to the talks.
• The final barrier to reunification fell in July 1990, when Kohl persuaded Gorbachev to drop his objections to a unified Germany remaining within NATO, in return for sizable West German financial aid to the Soviet Union; Gorbachev consented to reunification.
  • A unification treaty was ratified by the Bundestag and the People’s Chamber in September and took effect on 3 October 1990, formally concluding German reunification — and it was as the Berlin Wall came down that Gorbachev’s “Common European Home” concept began to take shape.
  • Separate negotiations between the GDR, the FRG, and the four occupying powers produced the “Two Plus Four Treaty” (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany), granting full sovereignty to the unified German state.

How the Fall of the Berlin Wall Fostered New Cooperation in Europe

• The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, had the immediate purpose of stopping the mass migration of people from East Berlin (controlled by the USSR) to West Berlin (controlled by the Western bloc led by the USA); its deeper motive was to escape the embarrassment of East Berlin’s poverty in sharp contrast to the prosperity of its capitalist western counterpart.
  • By the time Mikhail Gorbachev took over the presidency of the erstwhile USSR in 1985, the Soviet economic position was no match for the Western powers, and his policies of glasnost and perestroika signalled liberal reforms across the political, social, and economic spheres.
  • It was against this backdrop that Gorbachev met West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and effectively promised him freedom for East Germany and Berlin — a meeting that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, with it, new avenues of cooperation in Europe.
• This cooperation took shape in several ways: after the Wall’s collapse, East and West Germany reunified, and this reunification — Germany’s second after Bismarck — drove further socio-economic integration of Europe that eventually culminated in the European Union, of which Germany became a vital part.
  • The Western powers extended cooperation over the East–West Berlin issue: the USA agreed that reunification could proceed, while Great Britain and France, though less enthusiastic about German unification given fears of renewed German power, felt bound to go along with events.
  • Cooperation between Western and Eastern Europe, including Russia, increased once Europe was no longer divided into blocs, and the end of the Cold War gave further hope for cooperation; many Eastern European countries subsequently joined the European Union, strengthening European unity, and Europe began cooperating more with the rest of the world.
• This path of cooperation was not smooth, and it also produced confrontations: Britain and France’s initial reluctance over German unification stemmed from fears of a more powerful Germany, while Russia despised the extension of EU and NATO membership to Eastern European countries.
  • Integrating poor East Germany with rich West Germany, and poor Eastern Europe with rich Western Europe, also proved difficult, and there were voices within Europe opposed to cooperation and integration, fearing loss of national identity and economic disruption.
• The collapse of the Berlin Wall thus signified not only the end of communism and the disintegration of the USSR, but also a new level of cooperation in Europe, despite the obstacles it faced.

Soviet Republics Break Away

• Within the USSR itself, glasnost weakened the bonds holding the Union together, and by February 1990, with the dissolution of the USSR looming, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power.
  • At the same time, the freedom of press and dissent allowed by glasnost, combined with the festering “nationalities question,” increasingly led the Union’s component republics to declare autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely after the Baltic Way.
  • The Baltic Way (or Baltic Chain) was a peaceful political demonstration on 23 August 1989, in which approximately two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning 675.5 kilometres across the three Baltic republics — the Estonian SSR, Latvian SSR, and Lithuanian SSR — designed to draw global attention to their popular desire for independence.

Soviet Dissolution

• Gorbachev’s permissive attitude toward Central and Eastern Europe did not initially extend to Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January 1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania.

The New Union Treaty

• The Union of Sovereign States was the proposed name for a reorganisation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (15 republics in total) into a new confederatory body, put forward by Gorbachev in an attempt to avert the Soviet Union’s collapse.
  • The proposal was never implemented in the wake of the August Coup and the Soviet Union’s eventual dissolution in 1991; it was later resurrected in the form of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The 1991 Soviet Coup d’État Attempt (August Putsch)

• The August Coup was an attempt by hard-line members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) — opposed to Gorbachev’s reform programme and the new union treaty that would have decentralised much of the central government’s power to the republics — to seize control of the country from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
  • By August 1991, these hard-line elements of the Soviet government and military staged the coup; Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, and his enemies demanded his resignation as Soviet leader. Gorbachev refused, though many outside Russia began to doubt his government could survive.
  • Yeltsin and many of his supporters took refuge in the Russian Parliament and stepped in — correctly perceiving that a successful coup would destroy even Gorbachev’s limited reforms. He called on the Russian people to strike and take to the streets in opposition; the people responded by the thousands, and the poorly organised coup collapsed within days.
  • Although the coup collapsed in just two days and Gorbachev returned to government, the episode destabilised the Soviet Union and is widely considered to have contributed to both the demise of the CPSU and the dissolution of the USSR. The damage to the Gorbachev regime was nonetheless disastrous — in December 1991, with the Soviet Union crumbling around him, he resigned as the nation’s leader.
  • The USSR was fatally weakened by the failed coup and by a growing number of Soviet republics, particularly Russia, threatening to secede. Yeltsin emerged from the crisis as Gorbachev’s heir apparent — upon Gorbachev’s resignation announcement in December, Yeltsin immediately removed all flags of the former Soviet Union from government buildings in Russia and continued to serve as leader of the most powerful of the former Soviet socialist republics.

Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

• The Soviet Union collapsed with dramatic speed in the last quarter of 1991. Between August and December, 10 republics declared independence, largely out of fear of another coup; by the end of summer, Gorbachev no longer had the authority to influence events outside Moscow and was increasingly challenged by Yeltsin, who had begun taking over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Kremlin.
  • The final round of the Soviet Union’s collapse began with a Ukrainian popular referendum on 1 December 1991, in which 90 percent of voters opted for independence. The secession of Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, ended any realistic chance of Gorbachev holding the Union together even on a limited scale.
  • The leaders of the three principal Slavic republics — Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus — agreed to discuss alternatives to the union, and on 8 December, meeting secretly in western Belarus, signed the Belavezha Accords, proclaiming that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and announcing the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a looser association to take its place, inviting other republics to join.
    • Gorbachev called it an unconstitutional coup, but there was by then no reasonable doubt that, as the preamble of the Accords put it, “the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.”
  • On 12 December, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR formally ratified the Belavezha Accords and renounced the 1922 Union Treaty, and Russian deputies were recalled from the Supreme Soviet of the USSR — in effect, the largest and most powerful republic had seceded from the Union.
  • On 17 December 1991, along with 28 European countries, the European Community, and four non-European countries, the three Baltic Republics and nine of the twelve former Soviet republics signed the European Energy Charter in the Hague as sovereign states.
  • Doubts remained over the Belavezha Accords’ authority to disband the Soviet Union, since only three republics had signed them; however, on 21 December 1991, representatives of 11 of the 12 former republics — all except Georgia — signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, confirming the Union’s dissolution and formally establishing the CIS.
  • In a nationally televised speech early in the morning of 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct and ceding all its powers — including control of the nuclear arsenal — to Yeltsin.
  • On the night of 25 December 1991, after Gorbachev left the Kremlin, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time and the Russian tricolour raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union.
• The CIS was viewed as a successor entity to the Soviet Union, but its purpose was to “allow a civilised divorce” between the Soviet republics, making it comparable to a loose confederation rather than a unified state.

Conclusion

The collapse of Soviet communism and the disintegration of the USSR between 1985 and 1991 was the product of forces that had been building for over a decade: the economic and military strain of the Second Cold War and the Afghan quagmire, the moral and organisational challenge posed by Poland’s Solidarity movement, and finally Gorbachev’s own reforms of perestroika and glasnost, which — intended to save the Soviet system — instead accelerated its unravelling. For UPSC History Optional aspirants, this episode offers a rich case study in how external pressure, economic stagnation, and internal liberalisation can combine to bring down an entrenched authoritarian superpower, reshaping the political map of Europe and the wider world in the process.