The Fall of the USSR

The fall of the USSR began with their defeat in the War in Afghanistan, it was this that caused people to lose confidence in Communism, and around the late 1980s and early 1990s, they saw that the U.S. was more powerful than the USSR. Earlier, in March 1985, a Communist politician named Mikhail Gorbachev came to power over the Union, his hope for his time in charge was to improve the nation and benefit its people by building agricultural improvements and making political reforms as he hoped to establish a government more like a Nordic style social democracy. (1. RPC grade 8 history lesson 149) Two of his major reform ideas were Glasnost and Perestroika, Glasnost was an idea that brought about freedom of speech in the Union, where people could read and write things that had previously been prohibited by the Communists, and basically brought more openness to the nation. Perestroika meant that the rules would loosen and that people would have new freedoms, Gorbachev thought this would bring innovation and that the nation would see improvement as a result. When Communism dominated the country, the Warsaw Pact was made, which united countries under the power of the USSR, and many were forced to join and had remained under soviet control ever since, but when the union was weakened there was revolts in those districts and the governments were overthrown, most of the revolts succeeded quietly, but the Romanian Revolt was violent and ended with the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, the Communist Dictators of that country. (2. RPC 8 grade history lesson 149) After these revolutions, countries wanted to get out of the union and eventually they voted and 70% supported to secession. Following this, the union broke apart, the countries of Armenia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Latvia, were finally free of the Soviet Union. As for Russia, the USSR was abolished, Mikhail Gorbachev made all of this possible and is credited with restoring Eastern Europe.

Information points 1 and 2 gathered from the RPC 8^th grade history class.