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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.
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.
By the mid-1980s, when Gorbachev took power, many analysts were arguing that the Soviet Union was declining to the status of a Third World country. [532] In this context, Gorbachev argued that the Communist Party had to adapt and engage in creative thinking much as Lenin had creatively interpreted and adapted the writings of Karl Marx and ...
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 ]
He was credited with opening up the closed-off U.S.S.R. and steering the power through the end of the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of Soviet Union, dead at 91 Skip to main content
Gorbachev responded to this by putting marketization and constitutional amendments on hold in order to focus on reorganizing the Soviet Union to maintain its unity. The New Union Treaty was made to give more control to the republics over their own affairs, an attempt to keep them in the Union. However, the act was far too late, and no amount of ...