“The Soviet Union is Over,” cried the headline of the leaf on August 26, 1991. In a daring editorial decision, the newspaper lined up in that issue facts responsible for irretrievably mischaracterizing the communist empire created by Vladimir Lenin.
However, the formalization of the Bolshevik sunset came in December of that year, exactly three decades ago, with the political offensive by Boris Yeltsin and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1991, I was working in Moscow as a correspondent for the leaf. When disembarking the previous year, he knew that historical moments were approaching, but he certainly had no idea of ​​the disintegration of the military superpower, protagonist of the Cold War and central character of the 20th century.
The power of arms, displayed in terrifying military parades in Red Square, and the impressive territorial vastness, linking the Polish border with the far eastern Asia, seemed to cover with a cloak of longevity the successor to tsarist authoritarianism.
Mistaken assessment. The Soviet machine, capable of sending the first man into space (Yuri Gagarin, in 1961), failed in its mission to provide some of the basic needs of the population. It even received, in the Gorbachev era, international humanitarian aid, with food unloaded on airstrips ready to receive bolides from the powerful red Air Force.
Upon taking power in 1985, Gorbachev recognized the rotten state of the system and, to save it and preserve the power of the Communist Party, launched political (glasnost, transparency in Russian) and economic (perestroika, restructuring) reforms. Soon, it would lose control of the change process.
Glasnost provided unprecedented freedoms, such as expression and religious practice. In diplomacy, the quest to end the costly arms race with the US culminated in the elimination of the Cold War. Gorbachev won, in 1990, the Nobel Peace Prize.
Western “Gorbimania” contrasted with the rapid deterioration of the leader’s popularity at home. Perestroika was a resounding failure, with timid and pointless reforms, culminating in the biggest economic crisis since World War II.
The Moscow landscape emerged, crisscrossed by endless lines, with Soviets spending hours waiting for bread or milk. State stores offered empty shelves.
The binomial economic crisis and separatism was created, responsible for cutting short the Soviet adventure. Regional leaders, spread across the country’s continental expanse, from Brest to Vladivostok, blamed the Kremlin for the shortage of goods and stoked separatist sentiments, promising advances when they freed themselves from central power in Moscow.
Leader of Russia, the largest of 15 units to form the multi-ethnic USSR, Boris Yeltsin abandoned the communist past, catalyzed popular discontent, encouraged separatism, and launched himself as the number one enemy of the Soviet system and Mikhail Gorbachev.
On December 8, accompanied by the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, Yeltsin announced that he would no longer recognize Soviet power and decreed the end of the USSR. The world map started to draw 15 countries where there was only one.
Gorbachev tried to resist. However, politically weakened, he resigned on December 25th. The Russian tricolor flag fluttered over the Kremlin in place of the hammer and sickle on a red background.
I left Moscow in 1994, to experience the strange feeling of having arrived in one country, the Soviet Union, and, on the way out, to say goodbye to another, Russia.
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