654 Chapter 32
Poland), Moldova (a largely Romanian population lo-
cated on the Romanian border), and Ukraine. These six
newly independent states formed a solid belt stretching
from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, separating Russia
from Europe.
While the Soviet Union broke apart, the traditional
Communist regime of Russia itself also collapsed. Be-
tween late 1989 and early 1991, Russia experienced
constant change. Gorbachev announced a new agricul-
tural plan to break up the collective farms and a new
economic plan that introduced television advertising.
Unions were given the right to strike and promptly
tried it. The KGB announced that it disavowed its pre-
vious terrorism. Shevardnadze acknowledged that the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had been illegal. The
Red Army withdrew from most of Eastern Europe,
slowed only by limited finances for housing them in the
Soviet Union. After 100,000 public demonstrators de-
manded a multiparty democracy within the Russian
Federation, the Communist Party agreed to end its mo-
nopoly on political power. In one of the bluntest rejec-
tions of Communism, the Russian Parliament voted in
March 1990 to approve of private property, in Septem-
ber 1990 to allow religious freedom, and in May 1991
to give all Russian citizens freedom of travel, including
abroad. The Soviet archives were opened and confes-
sions poured out—from the calculation that Stalin’s ter-
ror had killed twenty million people to the admission
that the Soviet Union had been responsible for the
Katyn Massacre of Polish officers during World War II.
The city of Leningrad reverted to its historic name, St.
Petersburg. Thousands of other institutions and towns
simply took down the portrait, or pulled down the
statue, of Lenin, or any other symbol of the regime (see
illustration 32.6).
This stunning collapse of the USSR provoked con-
servative, anti-perestroikaCommunists to attempt a coup
d’état in August 1991. Advocates of the old regime, in-
cluding several leaders of the army and the KGB, held
Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and tried to
seize centers of power such as the Parliament building
in Moscow. Reformers, such as Yeltsin and the mayor of
St. Petersburg, resisted the coup and used the army
(which did not support the conspiracy) to bombard the
conspirators into submission. Boris Yeltsin, standing
atop a tank and exhorting the crowd to stand up to the
conspirators, became the leader of the new Russia.
While the ruins of the Russian Parliament still smol-
dered, Yeltsin shut down all offices of the Communist
Party, purged hard-liners from the government, and
suspended newspapers that had been sympathetic to
the coup, such as Pravda.Crowds in Moscow vandal-
ized the KGB building with impunity. Less than two
weeks later, in September 1991, Parliament voted the
dissolution of the USSR. Gorbachev remained in office
until resigning in December 1991. His farewell speech
did not regret his historic role. “The old system,” he
said, “fell apart.”
One of the most important consequences of the
Gorbachev revolution and the revolutions of 1989 was
the end of the cold war. From Gorbachev’s first days in
office, he tried to find ways to reach a historic agree-
ment with the United States; by late 1988 the toughest
conservative in Europe, Margaret Thatcher, did not
hesitate to say that she believed that the West could
trust Gorbachev and deal with him when he offered to
reduce Soviet military expenditures and to end the arms
race. Gorbachev won popularity in Europe with his re-
peated proposals to reduce Soviet military strength, but
the United States under President Reagan at first de-
clined to join in arms and expenditure reductions.
World opinion, however, gradually sensed that the cold
war was ending. When Gorbachev and Reagan met at
Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, the United States still in-
sisted upon building the new generation of star wars
weapons. But when the two heads of state met in the
Washington summit of 1987, Reagan agreed to cut nu-
clear arsenals and Gorbachev accepted unbalanced
terms: Over the next three years, the USSR would dis-
mantle 1,752 missiles and the United States, 859.
During 1989–91, numerous arms reduction treaties and
summit meetings underscored the conclusion that the
age of the cold war was over. When Gorbachev met
U.S. President George Bush on the island of Malta
in late 1989, phrase makers concluded that the cold
war had lasted “from Yalta to Malta.” A few months
later, Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize
for 1990.Helmut Kohl and the Reunification
of Germany, 1989–90
Two dramatic consequences quickly flowed from the
collapse of the Soviet bloc: (1) in October 1990 the
two Germanys reunited, when the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany) joined the Federal Republic of
Germany, and (2) in December 1990 Yugoslavia began
to break apart and fell into an internecine civil war
(1991–99), which killed hundreds of thousands and left
Yugoslavia divided into six states.