By the late 1980s, the Soviet empire was struggling to maintain its cohesion. Countries of the Eastern Bloc had begun to escape the Kremlin’s clutches, with Poland holding the first elections that allowed the democratic opposition to run in 1989, paving the way to the collapse of the communist party’s monopoly on power, and again in 1991, when the elections became fully democratic. In the meantime, East Germany and West Germany reunited into one German state in 1990.
The process of the collapse of the Soviet Union itself began in the Baltic States, which the Soviet Union annexed in 1940, with its grip on them solidifying after the victory of the Allies in World War II, who permitted the Soviets to keep Central and Eastern Europe as part of its sphere of influence. The process was largely peaceful, involving such events as the Baltic Way, which saw the residents of the three republics form a human chain spanning almost 700 kilometers and involving some 2 million people. But there were also tragic events with loss of life, such as an attempt by the KGB and Red Army to forcefully take over the Vilnius TV tower between January 11 and January 13, 1991.
As the situation became increasingly untenable, the leaders of the three Soviet republics that established the USSR: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, met in the Belovezha forest, near the border with Poland. On December 8, 1991, President Boris Yeltsin and First Deputy PM Gennady Burbulis (Russian FSSR), President Leonid Kravchuk and PM Vitold Fokin (Ukrainian SRR), as well as President Stanislav Sushkevich and PM Vyacheslav Klebich (Belarussian SRR) signed the Belovezha Accords, dissolving the Soviet Union.
Although Mikhail Gorbachev, previously the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and at this point the President of the USSR protested, his protests were in vain. Finally recognizing this, Gorbachev resigned on December 25, making him the first and last president the Soviet Union ever had.
The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the USSR’s parliament, voted to dissolve itself, making December 26, 1991, the final day of the long process of collapse.
