The War that Never was
The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985-1991
The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the great determining moments of history. An empire dissolved, and with it Communism, the creed which had sustained the projection of Soviet power. Confrontation, civil war, even nuclear apocalypse, seemed more likely than the abdication and surrender which in fact unfolded. Mikhail Gorbachev was the General Secretary who presided over the last years of the empire and the Party. What had begun as reform turned into the ruin of everything he had stood for all his life. Germany was reunited, and the Baltic states recovered their independence. With the exception of Romania, opposition governments replaced the Communists through processes of negotiation and election in one Soviet satellite after another. The Cold War melted away