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    A map of the Soviet Union in 1989

    The fall of the Soviet Union was a process which occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s whereby the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) collapsed quite quickly, leading to the emergence of over a dozen independent states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The fall came about as a consequence of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the USSR by introducing more open discussion of political life and society through (glasnost) and to restructure the Soviet economy after years of stagnation (perestroika). These efforts inadvertently led to the collapse of Soviet control over the Warsaw Pact countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and German reunification not long after. The political crisis then spread to the core of the USSR in Russia. Through a series of events in 1990 and 1991 the USSR was dismembered and fully independent nations like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan became independent from the new Federation of Russia. A decade of immense economic and social turmoil and change followed in Russia and the new nations. The fall of the USSR set off a period of intense migration in which millions of people moved across the borders of the former constituent states of the Union. Many people left Eastern Europe altogether.[1]

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    Fall of the Soviet Union chronology of events

    Soldiers during the Russian Civil War

    The Soviet Union or USSR was ushered into being late in 1917 as the Russian Revolution began, bringing the Bolshevik Communists to power. At the time the Russian Empire extended over a vast territory encompassing modern-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, much of Poland, the Baltic states region, Finland and Central Asia. The Russian Civil War that followed resulted in the Baltic states, Poland and Finland acquiring their independence as nation states, but against very large odds the Bolsheviks managed to retain control over the rest of the former Russian Empire, albeit with places like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan having a very nominal autonomy as separate socialist republics within the Soviet Union.[2] Moreover, following the Second World War, the Soviets had expanded further again to bring Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia under their control as well through the Warsaw Pact alliance, the Soviet counterpart to NATO.[3] Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been reconquered in 1940 and were more directly absorbed into the USSR following the war.[4]

    For many decades the Soviet Union got stronger and stronger. Through a system of industrialization and collectivized agriculture the economy was dragged rapidly into the twentieth century and Russia became one of the economic titans of the world, albeit with appalling human consequences that included a socially-engineered famine termed the Holodomor in the early 1930s. In the 1950s the growth of the Soviet economy outpaced that of most of its western counterparts and the Soviets appeared to be winning the Cold War, as seemingly demonstrated in their early successes in the Space Race.[5] Thereafter, though, things changed considerably and in the 1970s the Soviet economy began to stagnate. This pattern continued into the 1980s, even as the western powers entered a period of economic growth after the oil crisis and stagflation of the period from 1973 to 1980. Furthermore, the failure of the Red Army to win victory in Afghanistan after invading that country in late 1979 to support the communist regime there seemed to epitomize Soviet decline in the 1970s and 1980s.[6]

    Mikhail Gorbachev

    It was in this context that Mikhail Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet Union in 1985. He was of a new generation that had grown up long after the Russian Revolution and who had first entered politics in the era of de-Stalinization in the late 1950s and 1960s. As such, he was more willing to introduce liberal reforms and believed that speaking more openly about the problems of the Soviet Union, a policy he termed glasnost (openness), was needed. He also hoped to stimulate the Soviet economy back towards growth through perestroika. Yet Gorbachev very much wanted to retain the Soviet system. Inadvertently he would bring about its swift demise.[7]

    The first signs of collapse came in 1988 and 1989 as strikes spread across Poland and workers demanded free and open elections, while in Germany the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. These events effectively ended the Warsaw Pact. They also caused disquiet about Gorbachev’s leadership within the USSR itself.[8] In 1990 he faced widespread opposition and finally an attempted coup in August 1991. In the course of this the emerging star of Russian politics, Boris Yeltsin, outflanked Gorbachev and moved to claim power. Over the final months of 1991 Yeltsin organized the dismemberment of the USSR. It was formally dissolved on the 26th of December 1991. Years of instability would follow as Russia and other former Soviet countries experienced hyperinflation, social chaos and political turmoil, not least owing to Yeltsin’s alcoholism and declining ability to rule as corruption prevailed across the nascent federation.[9]

    Extent of migration after the fall of the Soviet Union

    The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the emergence of 15 independent nation states. The core nations in Eastern Europe were Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Three new countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, also gained their independence as the Baltic Sea states. In the Caucasus, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia became newly independent nation states. In Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan became countries for the first time. Finally, Moldova also gained its independence in the Balkans.[10]

    Soviet Jewish people arriving to Israel, c. 1990

    Because the Soviet Union had been one giant federal state under centralized Russian rule, many people had settled across borders during the three-quarters of a century of its existence. And many of these people were from different ethnic backgrounds. It was no major issue for a Kazakh to live in south-central Russia or for a Russian to live in Estonia. But when the USSR collapsed and the soft borders between the 15 different republics that made up the Soviet Union became hard borders between 15 different countries, many people were no longer so comfortable living as a minority group within a foreign nation. Thus, hundreds of thousands of people began moving between the new countries and this soon expanded into the millions of people as the 1990s went on.[11]

    Over time this migration was further driven by the economic crises which the former Soviet countries were plunged into as they entered into periods of radical economic, political and social change. Others still decided to leave Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia altogether and migrated further afield to places like the United States and Western Europe. An estimated three million Russians also migrated abroad.[12] An especially notable wave of migration was the movement of much of Eastern Europe’s remaining Jewish people to Israel in the course of the 1990s.[13]

    Demographic impact of the fall of the Soviet Union

    The demographic impact of all of this was huge. It constituted one of the great mass migrations of the twentieth century. Its effects were felt all over the former Soviet Union. For instance, tens of thousands of ethnic Russians began leaving Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1990 and heading for Russia itself. The three Baltic States experienced a decline of several hundred thousand people by the end of the 1990s and their population levels have never returned to the heights they had reached in 1989 just as the Soviet Union began to collapse.[14] Similar instances of population decline in the former Soviet republics could be instanced. Georgia’s population has declined by over 30% since independence, though there are a range of complicating factors involved there, notably the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 and ongoing separatism and political crises.

    A Russian market in 1992

    The demographic impact of the fall of the Soviet Union was often even more profound internationally. While many Jewish people living in the USSR had been allowed to leave in the 1970s and 1980s, there were still some barriers to doing so. All of these were lifted in the 1990s. Over 300,000 Jewish people left the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991 as it was collapsing. The vast majority headed for Israel. Thereafter the number declined, but on average, over 60,000 Jewish people from the former Soviet nations migrated to Israel each year for the remainder of the 1990s, bringing the overall figure across the decade to approximately one million people. Thus, the migration of Jewish people from the former lands of the Soviet Union both during and after the collapse has been a major factor in the more than doubling of Israel’s population since 1990.[15]

    Further afield Russian émigré communities grew in a large number of countries. Throughout the 1990s the United States took in tens of thousands of Russian annually, often on the basis of political asylum.[16] The economic crisis of this era saw many Russians migrate to Western European countries like France, Germany, Spain and Britain. However, while many Russians suffered as a result of the economic crisis, others became fabulously wealthy as one of the superpowers of the Cold War engaged in one of the most significant campaigns to privatize land, property and industry ever seen. Thus, the nouveau riche Russian communities that exist in places like London and Marbella in Spain are also an inadvertent by-product of the fall of the Soviet Union. Many decades from now, tens of millions of people will have an ancestor who migrated to one part of the world or another because of the events of the early 1990s in Eastern Europe.[17]

    See also

    Explore more about the Fall of the Soviet Union

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17858981
    2. ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/russian-revolution
    3. ↑ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/warsaw-pact
    4. ↑ Alfred Erich Senn, 'The Sovietization of the Baltic States', in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 317, The Satellites in Eastern Europe (May, 1958), pp. 123-129.
    5. ↑ G. I. Khanin, ‘The 1950s: The Triumph of the Soviet Economy’, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 55, No. 8 (December, 2003), pp. 1187–1211.
    6. ↑ Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill, 2016).
    7. ↑ D. W. J. McForan, ‘Glasnost, Democracy, and Perestroika’, in International Social Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 165–174.
    8. ↑ Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘The Revolutions of 1989: Causes, Meanings, Consequences’, in Contemporary European History, Vol. 18, No. 3, Revisiting 1989: Causes, Course and Consequences (August, 2009), pp. 271–288.
    9. ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17858981
    10. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/09/-sp-profiles-post-soviet-states
    11. ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-dilemmas-haunt-post-soviet-russia
    12. ↑ https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/1843094/
    13. ↑ Larissa Remennick, ‘Transnational community in the making: Russian-Jewish immigrants of the 1990s in Israel’, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 28 (2002), pp. 515–530.
    14. ↑ https://www.prb.org/resources/the-baltics-demographic-challenges-and-independence/
    15. ↑ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/israel-population/
    16. ↑ https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/1843094/
    17. ↑ https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin


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