The end of the largest country in the world was announced on December 25, 1991 on a TV special.
From the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev turned to the people, "for the last time as President," he said.
The Soviet head of state, who had impressed millions of people with his openness when he took office six years earlier, looked nervous when he briefly described his political failure.
He had "advocated the preservation of the Union state", but the "course of events" brought the breakup.
That same evening, the red flag with hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin and replaced by Russia's white-blue-red flag.
With that, a world empire came to an end that had taken Berlin in 1945 and sent the first human into space in 1961, perceived by the USA for decades as a superpower of equal military value.
A disintegration of this gigantic state?
Hardly imaginable.
A good two weeks earlier, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed a treaty to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
On December 21, 1991, a majority of former republics agreed to form the "Commonwealth of Independent States": a vague construction, neither a permanent confederation nor a federal state.
This made President Gorbachev a king without a country.
But as early as 1922, the year the Soviet Union was founded, a Russian politician had warned how fragile this state was.
"The whole machinery is going to fall apart."
At a Russian Communist party congress, he said that the government must "correctly express what the people recognize".
Because "otherwise the Communist Party will not lead the proletariat and the proletariat will not lead the masses and the whole machine will fall apart".
The speaker's name was Vladimir Ulyanov, known as Lenin.
The founder of the state and party leader named a basic problem of the Soviet government as early as March 1922: “The steering is slipping away from your hands: Apparently someone is sitting there driving the car, but the car does not go where he is driving it, but where someone else is going directs him. "
Lenin also spoke of systematic deception: "We get - especially I ex officio - to hear a lot of sweet communist whispering, day after day, and sometimes it makes one really nauseous."
Despite his harshness towards political opponents, Lenin was more of a skeptic than a state leader, more of an analyst than an agitator.
In 1922 he relentlessly shed light on the prospects of Soviet power.
It could happen that the state apparatus, “this bureaucratic monster,” gradually changes its character and the communists lose power: “History knows all sorts of metamorphoses;
Relying on faithful devotion and other splendid qualities - that shouldn't be taken seriously in politics. "
A coup as a nail in the coffin
This self-deception continued for decades - until the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) fell into a coma.
Gorbachev's last attempt at rescue: In the referendum in March 1991, more than three quarters of the participants voted for the continued existence of the multinational union state.
In the Ukraine a good 70 percent voted for the common state with Russia, in the Crimea almost 88 percent.
But several union republics refused to participate in the referendum: Georgia, Armenia and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had already set course for state independence.
Then a working group in Moscow drafted a new union treaty and planned to sign it on August 20, 1991. Gorbachev's project was only a federation, no longer a unified state.
And there was a lack of political forces capable of implementing it.
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August putsch 1991: Shivering game in Moscow by Uwe Klußmann
On August 19, nostalgic people, top functionaries of more mature vintages and lovers of spicy drinks staged a coup.
They were led by an alcoholic, previously Vice-President: with shaky drinking hands, Gennadij Janajew promised to "preserve the health and life of future generations."
The parody coup collapsed after three days - the last nail in the coffin for the Soviet Union.
Boris Yeltsin, as President of the Russian Federation, banned the CPSU, which he himself owed his career in the Politburo.
Method: trial and error - with many errors
With that, the steel bracket of the giant red empire was split in two, downright rusted through.
In most of the Union republics, the party only served to keep local elites in power.
Most of it had slipped away from Gorbachev.
After the attempted coup, he was little more than a decorative figure compared to Boris Yeltsin, Russian President since June 1991, elected in free elections with around 57 percent of the vote.
At the same time there was a lack of everyday necessities everywhere.
The shelves were empty, sugar and sausage just as scarce as pencils, teapots, razor blades and shoes.
Nevertheless, it was not primarily the massive economic crisis that brought down the Soviet system; historians and political scientists both inside and outside Russia today largely agree on this.
The decisive factor was that the ideology of the CPSU had already lost its effect in the early 1980s.
The political leadership no longer had any idea of the problems facing society.
In March 1983, Yuri Andropov published a surprising confession: "If we speak openly, then we have not yet studied the society in which we live and work to the necessary extent," he wrote as CPSU general secretary in the theoretical organ "Communist" .
"That is why we are forced to work empirically, so to speak, using the not very rational method of trial and error."
Worn down by nationality conflicts
It was an oath of revelation from the head of a party that had always claimed to shape politics on the basis of a "scientific worldview".
Andropov was an exception in the Politburo.
He had a keen analytical mind, headed the KGB secret service and succeeded Leonid Brezhnev at the head of the party at the end of 1982, but died in February 1984. After an interlude with the seriously ill Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985.
Andropov had promoted the Stavropol agricultural functionary because of his ability to "speak openly".
But while Andropov repeatedly asked experts to provide him with analyzes, for example on conflicts with nationalists in western Ukraine, the Baltic States and Chechnya, Gorbachev underestimated the explosive power of nationality conflicts.
They were reinforced by a "separator," as Russian researchers say.
According to the political scientist Yuri Solosobov, the Soviet Union had trained national elites in the large peripheral areas, especially in the Caucasus and Central Asia, who had been supplied with resources by the top government at the expense of the Russian heartland.
Solosobov shows the consequences using Azerbaijan as an example.
In September 2000, President Gejdar Aliyev, father of the current head of state, admitted that as party leader of the Soviet republic he "wanted Azerbaijan to become independent."
Escalation with fatal consequences
The Soviet leadership did not want to see this dynamic.
In 1986 Gorbachev still maintained that the "unbreakable friendship between peoples, respect for national culture and the national dignity of all peoples" were "firmly anchored in the consciousness of tens of millions of people" in the Soviet Union.
A wish far removed from reality.
In December 1986, thousands protested in Kazakhstan against a Russian as party leader before conflicts between Azerbaijani and Armenians escalated in the South Caucasus.
In February 1988 in Sumgait near Baku an Azerbaijani mob massacred Armenians with clubs and knives.
The Soviet state could no longer protect its citizens.
But Gorbachev stayed away from other conflicts that soon broke out elsewhere: between the Georgians and the peoples of the South Ossetians and the Abkhazians;
in Transnistria on the territory of the Republic of Moldova;
in Chechnya, where armed separatists staged a coup in September 1991.
Immediately after the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, political and ethnic differences escalated into civil wars.
The conflict in the Karabakh / Artsakh region between Armenia and Azerbaijan resulted in more than 20,000 deaths.
A long civil war broke out in Tajikistan in 1992 between Islamists and supporters of a secular state and resulted in around 100,000 deaths.
The first Chechen war from 1994, a direct result of the Soviet loss of control, killed around 80,000 people.
Nostalgic memories last
Numerous Western authors praise the “astonishing non-violence of upheaval”, according to the historian Manfred Hildermeier in his knowledgeable account “History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991”.
But there were far too many dead for the predicate "non-violent".
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, borders arose on what was once Soviet territory where there never were.
In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.
By that he meant "above all the humanitarian aspect", he told the Financial Times in 2019: All of a sudden 25 million Russians were "beyond the borders", a "tragedy".
A majority of Russian citizens see it similarly: the statement "We were a united, strong country" was agreed by two thirds in a 2020 survey by the independent Levada Center in Moscow.
They rated the work of the founder of the state Lenin just as positively three years earlier - who, according to Putin, had laid a "time bomb" under the building of the Soviet Union by creating national republics.
Lenin is even more firmly anchored in the mass consciousness than many Russian politicians and their Western opponents would like.