The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The short analysis

When the Soviet flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time in December 1991, it marked the end of a state that had defined global politics for nearly seven decades. What made the collapse so striking was its relative speed and its near-absence of large-scale violence. A superpower accounting for roughly one sixth of the earth's land surface fragmented into fifteen independent republics within roughly two years, leaving scholars and policymakers alike scrambling to explain what they had failed to predict. The roots of the collapse lay deep. By the early 1980s, the Soviet economy was trapped in structural stagnation. Military spending consumed a share of national output that civilian industry could not sustain, while falling global oil prices in the mid-1980s stripped the state of hard currency it depended on. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and launched his twin programmes of glasnost and perestroika, he was attempting a careful modernisation, not a demolition. But liberalising information while leaving the political monopoly of the Communist Party intact proved impossible. Once Soviet citizens could speak and read more freely, they began questioning not just policy but the legitimacy of the system itself. Nationalist movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia accelerated through 1990 and into 1991. The August 1991 coup attempt by hardliners, rather than freezing Gorbachev's reforms, destroyed the credibility of the central Soviet state almost overnight. By Christmas Day 1991 the Union was gone, replaced by fifteen successor states navigating independence with vastly different resources and prospects.