Gorbachev and the disintegration

Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985. He saw that the system was stuck and tried to reform it, with two policies:

• Perestroika ('restructuring'): reform the economy.
• Glasnost ('openness'): allow more free speech and information.

He also tried to improve relations with the West and to democratise the system.

Once people could speak, they did. The countries of eastern Europe rose up against their communist governments. Earlier, the USSR had sent troops to crush such protests. This time Gorbachev did not intervene, and the communist governments fell one after another.

The great symbol was the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. The wall had divided communist East Berlin from the West since 1961. Crowds tore it down, and Germany was reunited.

Inside the USSR, the republics began to demand freedom. Lithuania was the first to declare independence, in March 1990, followed by others.

In August 1991, communist hardliners tried a coup against Gorbachev. The people resisted. Boris Yeltsin, the elected leader of Russia, stood on a tank in Moscow to oppose it, and became a national hero. The coup failed, but Gorbachev's authority was gone.

In December 1991, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared that the Soviet Union was dissolved. The communist party was banned. Most former republics joined a loose Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Russia became the successor state: it took over the Soviet seat in the UN Security Council and its international treaties. Fifteen independent countries now stood where the USSR had been.