Political Science · Ch 1 — The End of Bipolarity
Gorbachev and the Disintegration
Gorbachev and the Disintegration
Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. He recognised that the USSR was falling behind the West in the information and technological revolutions, and that deep reforms were necessary to keep the country competitive. His goal was to modernise the system, not to destroy it.
Gorbachev pursued two major policies: glasnost (openness and democratisation) and perestroika (restructuring of the economy and political system). He also decided to normalise relations with the West, reducing Cold War tensions. These decisions, however, set off a chain of events that neither he nor anyone else had intended or anticipated.
Unintended consequences
Gorbachev's reforms did not strengthen the Soviet system — they fatally weakened it. The democratisation he introduced gave people the freedom to criticise the government, and the relaxation of control over Eastern Europe allowed long-suppressed nationalist and anti-Soviet movements to erupt.
People in the East European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc began to protest against their own communist governments and against Soviet control. Unlike in the past, when the USSR would have crushed such uprisings with military force (as in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968), Gorbachev did not intervene. This signal of non-interference emboldened protest movements across Eastern Europe. One by one, the communist governments of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania fell in a rapid wave of peaceful (and in Romania's case, violent) revolutions during 1989.
The most dramatic symbol of this collapse was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. East and West Germany were reunified in 1990. The Warsaw Pact, the military alliance of the Soviet bloc, was dissolved in 1991.
Within the Soviet Union itself, the republics began to assert their sovereignty. The Baltic republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) led the way, declaring independence. A failed coup by hardline communists in August 1991, who tried to stop the reforms, actually accelerated the disintegration. Gorbachev was weakened, and the Russian Republic's leader, Boris Yeltsin, emerged as the dominant figure.
The formal end came in December 1991. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (the three Slavic republics that had founded the USSR in 1922) signed a declaration stating that the Soviet Union was dissolved and replaced by a new entity: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) .
The surprise of the CIS declaration
The declaration on the disintegration of the USSR and the formation of the CIS came as a surprise to the other republics, especially those in Central Asia. They had not been consulted. This exclusion was quickly resolved by making them founding members of the CIS as well.
With the dissolution, Russia was accepted as the successor state of the Soviet Union. This meant:
- Russia inherited the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council (as a permanent member with veto power). …