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Soviet Union

21 bytes added, 11:47, November 25, 2017
/* Gorbachev and the end of Communism */
A reformer, he introduced a series of economic and political reforms known as ''[[glasnost]]'' ("openess") and ''[[perestroika]]'' ("restructuring"), which began to creak open the doors of the Soviet's closed system. A failed attempt to reign in the three [[Baltic States]] in 1989 led to a domino-effect of [[Warsaw Pact]] countries abandoning communism; a coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991 by hard-liners trying to keep their tattering empire ended within days. The USSR was formally dissolved on Christmas Day 1991 by [[Boris Yeltsin]], freeing many from its tyranny. The main successor state to the Soviet Union is Russia; the effort to form a "Commonwealth of Independent States" went nowhere, and the 15 republics of the USSR are now independent states.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 was a watershed event in terms of the [[decline of leftism]] and the [[decline of the secular left]].
==See also==