This year marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The landmark event of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that on December 25, 1991, at 7 p.m., the first and last President of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev, issued his resignation to the world.
The Soviet Union, a Red Empire of more than 22 million square kilometers spanning Eurasia, disintegrated without any foreign invasion or natural changes.
The full name of the USSR was: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 and initially had only four republics: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation. The Transcaucasian Federation is now Georgia plus Armenia and Azerbaijan. Later, the Soviet Union incorporated more republics and expanded its territory. After 1945, it reached the largest territory, covering most of Eastern Europe, as well as almost all of Central and North Asia, spanning 11 time zones, making it the largest country in the world.
Originally, the treaty established by the Soviet Union stipulated that every nation had the right to autonomy and that every union republic had the right to freely withdraw from the Union. However, with the passage of time, this policy changed, the republics were deprived of their right to self-government and ethnic relations became increasingly tense. By the time of Gorbachev, changes in the international landscape had intensified ethnic contradictions. At this time, the three small Baltic states took the lead and tore open the first crack in the Soviet Union.
By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, with a withered economy, financial constraints, and a whirlwind.
In the face of this mess, Gorbachev borrowed from East and West, open source and throttling. However, the Soviet Union's economic problems are difficult to return, and it is difficult to open source, so let's throttle. Gorbachev abandoned the arms race and reduced the number of troops sent to support eastern European satellite states in order to reduce huge military spending.
The satellite countries of the Soviet Union look at it, eh, there is an opportunity to take advantage of it. The people of the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe decided to take the risk of testing the power of Big Brother of the Soviet Union.
Poland was the first to do it. In June 1989, Poland elected its first non-Communist Prime Minister. In December, Parliament passed a constitutional amendment to restore the name of the country to the Republic of Poland, which ceased to be a "People's Republic". In January 1990, the Polish United Workers' Party, the Polish Communist Party, declared that it would cease its activities.
Hey, Big Brother of the Soviet Union didn't even send troops to intervene in Poland! The 1968 Warsaw Pact army drove tanks and crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, which was not repeated.
In this way, the regimes of the Soviet satellite states, like dominoes, collapsed one by one.
In 1990, there were actually two Gorbachevs.
Gorbachev in the first half of the year was a Gorbachev who was desperate to change the Soviet Union, and in the second half of the year, Gorbachev became Gorbachev who wanted to save the Soviet Union.
By the end of 1990, two political forces had emerged in Moscow.
One force is the radical faction represented by Yeltsin. In Gorbachev's view, Yeltsin did not want to change the Soviet Union, he wanted to make the Soviet Union die.
Another force was the hardliners within the CPSU, who blamed the chaos within the Soviet Union on Gorbachev's reforms.
Gorbachev, caught between the increasingly severe economic situation and separatism, chose to turn to the latter and to the hardliners within the CPSU. He organized a hard-line squad, with Yanayev as vice president, Yazov as defense minister, Pugo as minister of internal affairs, and Kryuchkov as chairman of the KGB. One is tougher than the other.
Unbeknownst to Gorbachev, a coup d'état was already waiting for him not far away. The people who launched the coup were the same people he relied on in the second half of 1990, and the purpose of the coup d'état was to save the Soviet Union, but it was counterproductive.
As we all know, the coup d'état of 19 August 1991 ended in failure. On the morning of August 21, 1991, the state of emergency was lifted and tanks were withdrawn from Moscow. The coup lasted only 3 days and ended here.
Three members of the National Emergency Committee, which staged the coup, committed suicide. They were, Minister of internal affairs Pugo, Marshal of the Soviet Army Akhromeyev, and Kruzina, a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. These three high-ranking officials, who happened to come from the soviet party, government and army, committed suicide on the one hand.
At this time, there was a fierce battle between Yeltsin and the "National Emergency Committee" that launched the coup d'état.
What to compete for?
Fight for Gorbachev.
At the time, Gorbachev was still in Crimea, under house arrest by the State Emergency Committee.
The "State Emergency Committee" sent KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and others to the Crimea by plane, expecting to set porcelain with Gorbachev and asking Gorbachev to give them a light shot. At that time, like Gorbachev, they did not know that Gorbachev would soon not even be able to control his own fate, and that Gorbachev himself would be sent down by others.
On the verge of taking down Gorbachev was Yeltsin. Yeltsin sent his deputy, Russian Vice President Rutskoy, on another plane to Crimea to keep Gorbachev under control.
Guys, the radicals Yeltsin want the Soviet Union to die, while the hardliners Yanayev want Gorbachev to die. If you were Gorbachev, which side would you choose?
What's more, the general trend of history, who can stop it?
Freezing three feet is not a cold day, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union was not an overnight thing.
In 1985, when Gorbachev's predecessor, the 74-year-old general secretary of the CPSU, Chernenko, died, the senior elders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at that time chose Gorbachev, who was only 54 years old, to succeed him as general secretary, thinking that he was the savior of the Soviet Union and that he could save the Soviet Union. Looking back now, in fact, they simply chose a curtain call for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was just the one who came to put the curtain on history for the Soviet Union.
On August 24, 1991, after being taken back to Moscow by Yeltsin, Gorbachev issued a statement resigning from his post as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and proposing the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The red flag of the sickle and the hammer fell.
Gorbachev left his former comrades with only two passwords, one of which was: Rest! One is: disband!
Neither of the two world wars nor the confrontation between the two major military blocs could cause the Red Empire of the Soviet Union to collapse, and no one could have imagined that the once invincible Soviet Union would disappear from the world so peacefully on that night 30 years ago. The name Soviet Union has rarely been mentioned since then.
This is really, helpless flowers fall, do not see the empire of the sun red.
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