As with many important historical events throughout history the dissolution of the Soviet Union had

The competition and increasing awareness on democratic rights did force the Soviets to stand back and make some major policy changes in 1980s. The Soviet Premier of the time Gorbachev tried to set some political and social reforms in the soviet society in order to ease the pressure and help Soviets to continue to survive in the international arena. Moreover, the Soviets did not only make shifts in their internal policies but also in their foreign policy understanding as well. For instance withdrawal from Afghanistan, signing of various nuclear deterrence agreements with multi parties including the US are some of the key changes that occurred in the 1980s. However, the reforms of Gorbachev did not prevent the Soviets to stop its collapse and eventually after a series of events in 1991 the Soviet Union formally announced its dissolution[7].

My cherished friend, I regret to inform you that our beloved Soviet society has ceased to exist. Our solid red flag with its magnificent gold emblem of the hammer and sickle flew above the Kremlin for the very last time on Christmas day, 1991. Prior to this gloomy day, eleven of the fifteenth Soviet republics that once made up the strong and prosperous Soviet Union, met in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, to announce that they would no longer partake in the Soviet Union, and had created a Commonwealth of independent states. Our Baltic brothers: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were the first to break apart, while Georgia remained as the last republic in the Soviet Union. I have served the Soviet Union as Minister of Foreign Affairs

The December of 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union—and with it, an entire era. Like the February Revolution of 1917 that ended tsardom, the events leading up to August 1991 took place in rapid succession, with both spontaneity and, to some degree, retrospective inevitability. To understand the demise of Soviet Union is to understand the communist party-state system itself. Although the particular happenings of the Gorbachev years undoubtedly accelerated its ruin, there existed fundamental flaws within the Soviet system that would be had been proven ultimately fatal. The USSR became a past chapter of history because it was impossible to significantly reform the administrative

The democratization, economic liberalization, and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union is commonly attributed to Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost reforms during the period of 1985-1991. This purpose of these reforms is still a trenchant question as the countries of the old Soviet Union, particular Russia, are being pressured to further liberalize their economies.

Blaming Gorbachev for the Collapse of the Soviet Union On December 5 1991 the Soviet Union was declared officially non-existent, radically changing the world’s economic and political environment. On the 10 February 1991 Heydar Aliyev spoke in Parliament warning of his anticipation that the Soviet Union was to collapse, “The Culprit to be blamed is Gorbachev”. There is no doubt Gorbachev played a prominent role in the fall of communism in the USSR and the collapse of the USSR itself, as well as acquiring the responsibility for ending the Cold War, a major post-war tension. What I will endeavour to conclude in this essay is the extent to which Gorbachev was responsible for the USSR’s downfall

The Soviet Union was at one time one of the two most powerful countries in the world, and yet the Soviet Union is not longer in exists. How did this come to be? They were on the winning side of World War II, with the United States. They were growing in size, and they were spreading communism to other countries. They were on pace to be as powerful and influential as the United States. While there are many reasons as to why the Soviet Union collapsed, the main reason is the Cold War. There were also two very important people that contributed to the fall Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Moreover, while things were getting out of control in the Soviet Union, one nation that can illustrate how the Soviet Union finally collapsed is Russia. Things were like as it is when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power following the death of Konstantin Cherenko in 1985. Gorbachev used the policy of Glasnot, or “openness to freedom of

The collapse of the communist Soviet Union ultimately led to the end of the cold war. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. Thus highlighting the inferiority of communism and the superiority of western capitalism. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, however, was a result of both domestic and international factors including policies established by both the US and the Soviet leaders, most importantly Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ reforms combined with the hard-line approach of Ronald Reagan. It has also been argued that the collapse of communism in eastern Europe was inevitable due to its moral bankruptcy, as well as the growing economic pressures which ultimately forced the Soviet Union to

In 1989, the world saw the fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (U.S.S.R.), which was also known as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a block of 15 Communist Eastern European states that was ruled by one government with various puppet governments located throughout the states. Its collapse brought about new issues that the world had never had to deal with before. The fall of such a large block of Soviet states created many problems and some of the solutions that were used to solve these problems, as well as many of the tensions that were created during this time, still affect the world today. Some of the ramifications resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse are still being felt; however, many problems have been solved

Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the disintegration of a country based on an uncompromising ideological dogma, the unlikely inheritor of Marxist/Leninist communist philosophy. The Soviet Union’s unwieldy economic superstructure left it vulnerable to Ronald Reagan’s aggressive economic/military policy, an approach based on the belief that a military build-up would force the Soviets to spend to keep pace, an effective strategy because it pushed the Soviet economy over the edge into ruin. The subsequent implosion ended communist domination in Eastern Europe and opened the way for democratic elements that radically altered the political landscape in Moscow. When the Soviet Union officially came to an end in 1993, it briefly recalled the end of tsarist rule in 1917, with the potential for the kind of chaos and violence that turned the Russian Revolution into a bloodbath. President Boris Yeltsin used the military to disband parliament but his call for new elections moved the country toward a more open, democratic form of government. Lacking any real background in representative government, Russia ultimately proved incapable of fulfilling the promise of democratic government and descended into a form of anarchy riddled by increasingly strong criminal elements. In recent years, the rise of Boris Putin, a new strongman in Moscow, helped restore a sense of order and allowed the resurgence of communist elements. The government that now holds power, and which

The Cold War, in one sense, was a power struggle between the two nuclear military giants of the age, the United States and the Soviet Union. But on a more basic level, the Cold War was a contest between two opposing ways of life. One was democratic capitalism, whose leading representatives were the United States and the nations of Western Europe. The other was totalitarian Communism, the system of the Soviet Union and its "satellite" nations in Eastern Europe. Between 1945 and 1990, despite constant tensions and an alarming buildup of nuclear arms on both sides, the United States and the Soviet Union officially remained at peace—hence the name the "cold" war. Yet it was hardly a peaceful era. Furthermore through newspapers in USSR (Pravda and

The many long-term internal causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union centralized around weaknesses in their economy. They had an inflexible central planning system, the inability to modernize, and the inefficiency in their agriculture production. Sometime around the 1970's the computer and automation revolution had emerged. This revolution took over the West, but practically missed the Soviet Union, except in the military sector (Baylis & Smith, 2001.) Gorbachev's goal in economic restructuring was to create a separation between the economic and the political. The major changes began with the legalization of private farming and business co-operatives, and the allowing of foreign company ownership over Soviet enterprises (Baylis &Smith, 2001) All of Gorbachev's ideas on economic restructuring backfired on him since the price levels were inconsistent, and a sense of social confusion about the future of their state was created.

One of the most revolutionary historical events in the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. The dissolution of the USSR was at the time, not immediately foreseen nor expected. There was neither a civil war nor people’s revolution in a military coup that stormed the King’s castle. The only very evident factor, however, was that the economy of the Soviet Union preceding its dissolution was in free fall to be eventually coined the Era of Stagnation. But an economy in trouble could not be the cause that would lead to the collapse of seventy year-old seemingly powerful nation. It would not be the first first-world nation in economic trouble. It would take the Soviet Union’s last leader’s misguided attempts at reforms within his own party that intermixed with loosening the nation’s century old political ideology to open the floodgates for a chain of events and repercussions that would lead to the USSR’s collapse. If not for Gorbechav’s liberal sentiments at reforming a communist nation under democratic ideologies that had only previously survived under totalitarian oppression, the USSR might exist today given no other major historical events succeed and alter its continuing Communist pathway.

In June of 1991, Yeltsin won the presidential election in Russia. He became the first Russian leader to stand in a legitimate election. Yeltsin inspired mass demonstrations against the 1991 attempt to overthrow Gorbachev’s, the president before him, government (“The Fall of the Soviet Union”). This brought him popularity. Yeltsin decided to capitalize on his popularity by going forward with radical reform policies. After doing things like banning the CPSU, confiscating CPSU’s assets, and distributing the state’s assets to the populace. So, it did not take Yeltsin much time at all to start to dismantle the Soviet Union (“The Fall of the Soviet Union”).

Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union underwent massive social, political and economic reform that drifted away from communist ideology and this ultimately lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union and failure of communism in Eastern Europe. This essay will focus on how the Perestroika reform and Glasnost policy programs as well as other external and internal pressures contributed to the failure of communism under Gorbachev. The aim of the Perestroika and Glasnost reforms was to restructure and strengthen the Soviet political and economic system and provide more freedom and democracy within the Soviet Union while strengthening Communism. However, these changes had achieved exactly what they aimed to prevent when they were first elaborated and led to the failure of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. While focusing on the policies this essay will also focus on the major increase in nationalism that occurred in the Soviet Republics as a result of the Glasnost. External pressure from the western world was also a factor and the role that the United States and the Ronald Reagan administration played in the downfall of communism under Gorbachev will be examined. The essay will also discuss how the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the 1991 Coup d’état led to the failure of the policies and failure of communism.