This event may not have caused the fall of the Iron Curtain, but it certainly symbolized the spirit of the period and accelerated the inevitable: the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986, near the city of Pripyat in Soviet Ukraine.
The nuclear disaster was born out of a combination of technical failures, alongside a culture of lies and rendering, in an empire that forbade itself to show weakness.
However, the heat in reactor number four and the explosion accelerated the melting process of the Cold War.
The President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, even tried to stop the collapse, and introduced a series of reforms ("perestroika") to introduce elements of a free market. He also sought to introduce a policy of openness and freedom of expression ("Glassnost"), but it was too late. The Soviet Union disintegrated, under pressure from national movements. The attempted coup ("putsch") of the conservatives in the Communist Party, in collaboration with the KGB, in August 1991, did not stop the process: the putschists were defeated. Gorbachev survived, but lost all influence and became irrelevant - The world and gave way to a new Russia.
In a sense, the world before the collapse was much simpler: the United States against the Soviet Union, capitalism versus socialism, democracy versus dictatorship, liberty versus its restriction. Almost all countries of the world were divided into two camps. , There was also a cultural aspect and an ideological line: while the Soviet Union created flashy tools like missiles and tanks, but its planned economy found it difficult to supply basic products like sausage or toilet paper - in the US they worked hard on sophistication and developed tiny chips.
30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
However, the importance of the Soviet Union must not be underestimated or neglected: its effects are still alive among us, and the fall of the Berlin Wall did not necessarily create a unipolar world, with the exception of some of the 1990s.
The United States did gain hegemony in the West, but internal processes within it created a state of instability. The 9/11 attacks marked the end of an era.
Some argue that the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the victory of the West were the worst thing that happened to the United States, events that ironically accelerated the weakening of Great America.
True, the United States is still the strongest power of all, and has no competitors in the military. But economically it is no longer alone, because another red giant has grown, with the help of America itself, during the Cold War: the People's Republic of China. Are we at the beginning of an era Another bipolar, this time between Washington and Beijing?
During the Cold War a game was created between two players, which had quite clear rules.
When one player tended to escalate, the relationship constituted a balancing force because in the end it was a battle between rational players.
This is an important conclusion of that difficult and formative period: to keep the rules of the game, even between enemies.
Internal processes are also taking place within China, and unforeseen events may happen there as well.
This is not something reserved only for the US. Empires are falling, and that is the nature of the world, and only at the moment of occurrence does it seem to have happened suddenly, in complete surprise.
Were we wrong?
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