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The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. [1] It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and General Secretary (also ...
- Overview
- The political factor
- The economic factor
- The military factor
- Afghanistan
- The social factor
- The nuclear factor
On January 1, 1991, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering some 8,650,000 square miles (22,400,000 square km), nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface. Its population numbered more than 290 million, and 100 distinct nationalities lived within its borders. It also boasted an arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, ...
When Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on March 11, 1985, his primary domestic goals were to jump-start the moribund Soviet economy and to streamline the cumbersome government bureaucracy. When his initial attempts at reform failed to yield significant results, he instituted the policies...
By some measures, the Soviet economy was the world’s second largest in 1990, but shortages of consumer goods were routine and hoarding was commonplace. It was estimated that the Soviet black market economy was the equivalent of more than 10 percent of the country’s official GDP. Economic stagnation had hobbled the country for years, and the perestr...
It is a widely held belief that Soviet defense spending accelerated dramatically in response to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and proposals such as the Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, the Soviet military budget had been trending upward since at least the early 1970s, but Western analysts were left with best guesses in regard to hard number...
In addition to budgetary matters, the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan (1979–89) was a key military factor in the breakup of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet army, lionized for its role in World War II and a vital tool in the repression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, had waded into a quagmire in a region known as the Graveyard of Empires. A...
On January 31, 1990, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Moscow. The image of the Golden Arches in Pushkin Square seemed like a triumph of Western capitalism, and customers lined up around the block for their first taste of a Big Mac. But such a display was not uncommon in the final years of the Soviet Union; Muscovites queued just as long fo...
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States teetered on the edge of mutual nuclear destruction. What few had considered, however, was that the Soviet Union would be brought down by an incident involving a civilian nuclear plant. Gorbachev had been in power for just over a year when, on April 26, 1986, the Unit 4 reactor at the C...
Dec 24, 2021 · Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev closes his resignation speech after delivering it at the Kremlin in Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991. After 74 years, the Soviet Union was dissolved, breaking into 15 countries.
Oct 28, 2024 · Collapse of the Soviet Union, sequence of events that led to the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. on December 31, 1991. The reforms implemented by President Mikhail Gorbachev and the backlash against them hastened the demise of the Soviet state. Learn more about one of the key events of the 20th century in this article.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Oct 28, 2024 · Independence movements and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Collapse of the Soviet Union - End of Communism, Gorbachev, Glasnost/Perestroika: The collapse of the coup led to the demise of Soviet communism. The CPSU had failed to produce a modern dynamic state and society. The economic decline of the Soviet Union during the 1980s had ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the world’s most momentous event of the late twentieth century. Soviet and American tanks face each other at Checkpoint Charlie during the Berlin Crisis, 1961. The Cold War—the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that had dominated international politics for forty years—came to an end.
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Dec 25, 2021 · Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history. In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now ...
