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The final round of the Soviet Union's collapse began on 1 December 1991. That day, a Ukrainian popular referendum resulted in 91 percent of Ukraine's voters voting to affirm the independence declaration passed in August and formally secede from the Union. The secession of Ukraine, long second only to Russia in economic and political power ...
The 1991 Soviet coup attempt, also known as the August Coup, [b] was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the CPSU at the time.
Perestroika (/ ˌ p ɛr ə ˈ s t r ɔɪ k ə / PERR-ə-STROY-kə; Russian: перестройка, IPA: [pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə] ⓘ) [1] was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s, widely associated with CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "transparency") policy reform.
Gorbachev rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine, the idea that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene militarily in other Marxist–Leninist countries if their governments were threatened. [209] In December 1987 he announced the withdrawal of 500,000 Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe. [ 210 ]
Just moments before that, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address, drawing a line under more than 74 years of Soviet history.
The General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, declared in his opening speech that political reform was the key issue. [2] [3] Gorbachev wanted to achieve the "democratization of the life of the state and society", and wanted the Soviet Union to "move along the path of the creation of a socialist state under the rule of law".
This was during the attempted coup by eight Soviet officials who tried to seize control of the country from General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. ... throughout the history of the Soviet Union ...
He was credited with opening up the closed-off U.S.S.R. and steering the power through the end of the Cold War.