December 25, 1991

I just finished this book - called "December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union" - (in one sitting) and really liked it. I got it for Christmas and thought I would start reading it because this is the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR. I didn’t expect much from a book like this.

The book is about the last day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics existed (hence the title.) It is divided in the different parts of the day for Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (Михаил Сергеевич Горбачёв) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 and the first/last Soviet President from 1990-1991. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (Борис Николаевич Ельцин) was the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) from 1990-1991 and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. They were completely different men that worked to bring the collapse of the Soviet Union – whether they wanted to or not. Gorbachev worked to keep the USSR together but with liberal socialism while Yeltsin worked to give more power and autonomy to the RSFSR.

The book shows how one of the world’s two superpowers ended without much fan-fare. The 74 years of Soviet Communist experiment was dead. The once mighty and feared Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed from within.

I have studied a great deal on the USSR and thought I knew everything major about the former country, but this book taught me even more. One thing I learned was that Gorbachev expected to resign as the first/last Soviet President on December 25, 1991 but that the Soviet Union wouldn’t officially dissolve until December 31, 1991. In fact, shortly after Gorbachev resigned Yeltsin had the Soviet Hammer and Sickle Flag lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian Tri-Color. You would think that a world superpower, the largest country in the world with an empire that stretched from Europe to Asia, which dominated world politics for almost 50 years and helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster would have ended in a more dynamic way. In the end, after decades of immense military spending, the country was bankrupt. By the 1980s the ordinary Soviet citizen was forced to stand many hours each day in lines looking for food and basic supplies. There was rationing of most food products and consumer goods – when anything was available. In short, the everyday survival for the Soviet citizen was more important than what country they currently lived in or what its name was.

I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for a Soviet citizen in their 30s in 1991 to go from living in a superpower, Communist dictatorship to there being 16 independent countries and capitalism overnight. For over 70 years Soviets could move around the USSR (although there were controls) and in one night you could find yourself in a foreign, independent country. Ethnic Russians who enjoyed the most benefits within the Soviet Union were now second-class citizens in many of the former Soviet Republics (some countries don’t even consider them citizens at all even 20 years later.) While ethnic Russians had a difficult time even within the new Russian Federation it was all the other former Soviet people (ie the ethnic Ukrainians, Georgians, etc) who literally lost everything and had to start from scratch. The Russian Federation gained control of all the major former Soviet institutions (ie embassies, etc) and simply renamed them Russian instead of Soviet while the other 15 former Soviet Republics had to finance their own from the ground-up.

This book gives a very good, detailed account of what happened on the last day of the Soviet Union. While many people at the time probably didn’t notice or care about what happened – especially those in the former USSR – it is important to know what happened 20 years ago and see where the world has come since.