- Fall of the Berlin Wall. This event was of enormous importance in the fall of the Soviet Union. It was a sudden and entirely unexpected event that showed the world how badly Germany wanted reunification and how quickly that could be achieved. The wall fell on November 9th, 1989; the country was officially reunified on October 3rd, 1990, less than a year later.
- The Solidarity movement. The Solidarity movement started in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. Led by Lech Walesa, the Solidarity trade union would eventually have more than 1/3rd of the country’s workers as members. The Solidarity members used civil resistance to resist the communist regime and effect change and reform. The government would try to suppress the movement with the 1981 invocation of martial law in Poland, including the use of tanks, detention of dissidents, censorship, etc. But still, the movement continued to exist and grow. The movement’s demonstration began to truly weaken the grip the Soviet Union had on its satellite states, and is recognized by many as a blow that made the fall of the wall possible in 1989. Lech Walesa, for example, was a featured speaker at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during the 2009 20-year anniversary of the fall of the wall ceremonies.
- Gorbachev appointed as communist party General Secretary. Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985. He introduced policies such as glasnost and perestroika, which enabled a liberalization of the Soviet Union. Glasnost would allow greater freedom of speech for the Soviet public, which was a clear relaxation of the vice grip the party had held on the nation since at least the Stalin era. Gorbachev would also establish close ties with Western leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr., and Helmut Kohl, easing the negotiation process when the wall did finally come down and a domino effect began across the satellite and Soviet states. His decisions of non-intervention in the satellite states ultimately led to the collapse of the entire Soviet Union.
- The “Prague Spring”, begun in January 1968 with the election of Alexander Dubček and ended in August of the same year, was a period of reforms and liberalization in the Czechoslovakia. While the reforms were abruptly ended by the invasion of troops from other Soviet states and the brutal crushing of the movement by force, the reforms were hugely popular within Czechoslovakia, and would have continued had it not been for the Soviet intervention. Gorbachev would later be guided in glasnost and perestroika by Dubček’s attempted reforms in the Prague Spring.
- The 1991 coup in Russia was a last-ditch attempt by the hardline elements in the communist party who wanted to remove Gorbachev as General Secretary of the party to stop the reforms he had enacted. By this point, the satellite states had reformed and mainly democratized. Many of the republics within the Soviet Union itself had already declared their independence as well, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Georgia. There was widespread social unrest. Russia itself had also declared sovereignty. The hardline elements declared a state of emergency and claimed powers to enact extraordinary actions. The leaders detained Gorbachev, but did not detain Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The coup was crushed in two days, and Gorbachev declared all declarations of the conspirators null and void. Within a week of the August coup, the Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan declared independence from the Soviet Union. In December of 1991, Russia was given the Soviet Union’s UN membership as its successor state, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president, and the Soviet Union officially no longer existed. The August coup certainly played a huge role in accelerating these events.
