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The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, as it had become morally and financially bankrupt; morally bankrupt through the continued repression of its people, and financially bankrupt through its inability to match the USA in military spending. Its shortcomings were represented by a stagnating economy, a shortage of goods, and general disquiet with the regime.
To revive the economy, the Russian premier and committed communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, called for a programme of market-oriented economic reforms (‘Perestroika’) and openness (‘Glasnost’) in the mid-1980s, not realising for a minute that this would lead to the dissolution of the USSR within six years. Despite growing problems in the economy to which there was no quick fix, Gorbachev’s popularity soared, thanks largely to the fact that people became less fearful of speaking openly. He had let the genie out of the bottle.
The collapse of the communist Eastern bloc was sudden and relatively bloodless as revolutions go. Poland became the first non-communist government in Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, a human rights campaigner, Vaclav Havel, was elected as president. In October 1989, the East German leader, Erich Honecker, resigned under pressure and East Germany opened its borders. Thousands of Eastern Europeans fled to the West, unsure of how long the border would remain open. Within a month the hated Berlin Wall had been torn down and Germany was unified the following year.
In August 1991, hardliners in the Soviet government who were unhappy at the changes and totally out of touch with the people they ruled, attempted a coup. However, massive demonstrations led by the Mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, ensued and the barricading of the Russian parliament by the people brought the coup to an end within days. Having tasted the albeit limited fruits of freedom, the people understandably had no intention of returning to the old system. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president and the USSR was formally disbanded, giving way to 15 independent countries. The Russians had lost the Cold War. As Ian Morris relates in ‘Why the West Rules for Now’, ‘the end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.’113
For the new nations that sprang up after the dissolution of the communist bloc, life was not as rosy as they had expected it to be; unprepared for independence and with little experience of managing a free-market economy, they struggled under tough economic conditions and major increases in crime. Almost immediately, Yugoslavia fell apart in a brutal and bloody civil war. Territorial and ethnic conflict intensified elsewhere and terrorism became increasingly common.
The Cold War had acted as a lid on simmering disputes, as order had come about ‘through the superpower dominance of two blocs and superpower influence in the third world.’114 Many nations now acquired highly sophisticated weapons and even nuclear weapons, which were seen as the only effective policy to challenge powers that they had no chance of defeating on a conventional battle-field. Indeed it was the threat of Iraq developing nuclear weapons that the USA used as an excuse to invade the oil-rich country in 2003.