Gorbachev Resigns: The Soviet Union Dissolves

Mikhail Gorbachev sat alone at his desk in the Kremlin on Christmas night 1991, signed the decree dissolving his own office, and handed the Soviet nuclear launch codes to Boris Yeltsin. At 7:32 PM Moscow time, the red hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin dome for the last time and replaced by the Russian tricolor. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a superpower that had shaped the twentieth century more than any other political entity except the United States, ceased to exist. The dissolution had been accelerating since August, when a failed coup by Communist hardliners against Gorbachev paradoxically destroyed the remaining authority of both the party and the central government. Yeltsin had stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament to rally resistance. His defiance made him the dominant political figure in the country, while Gorbachev returned diminished and irrelevant, president of a union whose republics were racing to declare independence. Ukraine referendum on December 1, in which over 90 percent of voters chose independence, was the fatal blow. Without Ukraine, the second most populous and economically important republic, the Soviet Union had no viable future. On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met secretly at a hunting lodge in the Belovezha Forest and signed an agreement dissolving the USSR and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev denounced the action as illegal, but he commanded no army, no party, and no public support. The collapse freed fifteen nations, ended the Cold War, and left the United States as the sole global superpower. For Russians, the decade that followed brought catastrophe: hyperinflation wiped out life savings, state assets were looted by oligarchs, and male life expectancy dropped to 57. Gorbachev, revered in the West for ending the Cold War peacefully, remains widely resented in Russia for the chaos that followed.