Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

After consolidating his power by changing the Politburo membership, Gorbachev launched a campaign aimed at reforming Soviet society. His agenda called for perestroika (Russian, “restructuring”) of the nation's economy and glasnost (Russian, “openness”) in political and cultural affairs. At a conference of the Communist party held in late June 1988, Gorbachev proposed a series of constitutional reforms that would shift power from the party to popularly elected legislatures, reduce the party's role in local economic management, and greatly increase the powers of the presidency. Three months later, Andrey A. Gromyko retired as state president (a post he had held since 1985), and Gorbachev assumed the office. In March 1989, Soviet voters took part in their first nationwide competitive election since 1917, choosing the newly reconstituted Congress of People's Deputies: the congress convened in May to select the Supreme Soviet and to elect Gorbachev to a 5-year presidential term. Complicating the process of domestic economic reform were, in April 1986, a serious accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, which caused significant environmental damage and revealed major deficiencies in the Soviet nuclear programme; and, in December 1988, an earthquake in Armenia that left more than 25,000 dead and at least 400,000 homeless.

An agreement providing for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was reached in April 1988. Official figures issued in May indicated that 13,310 Soviet soldiers had been killed and 35,478 injured in the fighting. The withdrawal was completed by February 1989; in October, Soviet leaders acknowledged that the intervention in Afghanistan had “violated the norms of proper behaviour”.

Between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev held a series of summit conferences with US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. At a meeting with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, the two leaders exchanged bold new arms reduction proposals, but negotiations broke down over the Soviet demand for limitations on research and testing of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The two presidents signed an agreement in December 1987 to eliminate medium-range and certain shorter-range missiles. In May 1990, Gorbachev and Bush signed a treaty to end production and reduce stockpiles of chemical weapons, and in July 1991 the two men signed an accord requiring substantial cuts in strategic nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev's initiatives in other foreign policy areas were equally striking. In December 1988, at the UN General Assembly, he announced unilateral reductions in conventional forces, notably in Eastern Europe and along the Sino-Soviet border. During Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in May 1989, China and the USSR agreed to resume normal relations after a 30-year rift. At a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in December, Gorbachev promised that the Soviet Union would allow full religious freedom, and the USSR and the Vatican agreed to establish diplomatic ties. Relations with Israel also improved dramatically, as the USSR relaxed emigration restrictions on Soviet Jews. After August 1990, with tensions rising in the Persian Gulf, the USSR generally supported the US-led effort to use economic and military pressure to force Iraq to give up Kuwait.

Among the most dramatic departures from past Soviet policy was the refusal of the USSR to intervene in Eastern Europe as, between 1989 and 1991, reform movements ousted Communist governments in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia; Communist East Germany dissolved and became part of the Federal Republic of Germany; and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact, two cornerstones of Soviet foreign policy, disbanded. Nor was Soviet Communism immune to the forces that brought down the Eastern European regimes. In February 1990, with the Soviet economy rapidly deteriorating, the Communist party agreed to give up its monopoly on political power. In March, as Gorbachev became executive president, insurgents scored significant gains in local elections. Gorbachev had lost considerable public support for his domestic policies. On March 11, Lithuania declared itself a sovereign state, defying Moscow's sanctions. Nationalist and independence movements also were active in the other republics, and outbreaks of ethnic violence were increasingly common. In November Gorbachev again sought to augment his presidential powers and implement political and economic reforms.

Communist hard-liners, who included many of the Soviet government's top officials, attempted a coup in August 1991, placing Gorbachev under house arrest and moving to reimpose centralized Communist control. In three days, the reformers, led by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, crushed the coup and began to dismantle the party apparatus. With the USSR on the verge of collapse, the Congress of People's Deputies agreed on September 5 to establish a transitional government in which a State Council, headed by Gorbachev and including the presidents of participating republics, exercised emergency powers. The next day the council recognized the full independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Increasingly, Yeltsin's influence eclipsed that of Gorbachev, and the Russian government assumed the powers the Soviet government in Moscow had previously exercised. On December 21, the USSR formally ceased to exist, as 11 of the remaining 12 republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia (renamed Belarus), Kazakhstan, Kirghiziya (renamed Kyrgyzstan), Moldavia (renamed Moldova), Russia, Tadzhikistan (renamed Tajikistan), Turkmenia (renamed Turkmenistan), Ukraine, and Uzbekistan—agreed to form the loosely defined Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet parliament acknowledged dissolution of the USSR on December 26 (see Communism, Collapse of).