THE SOVIET UNION CAME TO AN END 30 YEARS AGO

The Soviet Union ceased to exist as a nation 30 years ago today.

On Dec. 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union. The Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin and the tricolor state flag of the Russian Federation hoisted instead.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded in 1922 by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Over the next seven decades, the USSR expanded as it helped to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II, put the first human in space, became a nuclear superpower and fomented communist revolution around the world.

Gorbachev had ruled the world’s biggest country since 1985, leading it from communism toward democracy and playing a major role in ending the Cold War, a state of political hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies that had existed since the end of WWII.

From The San Diego Union, Thursday, Dec. 26, 1991:

SOVIET RULE ENDS WITH GORBACHEV

REVOLUTION DIES OF OLD AGE AT 74

UTOPIAN PROMISE OF BETTER LIFE FOR ALL TURNED INTO CRUEL ILLUSION

By SERGE SCHMEMANN, New York Times News Service

MOSCOW — The Soviet state, marked throughout its brief but tumultuous history by great achievement and terrible suffering, died yesterday after a long and painful decline. It was 74 years old.

Conceived in utopian promise and born in the violent upheavals of the “Great October Revolution of 1917,” the union heaved its last breath in the dreary darkness of late December, stripped of ideology, dismembered, bankrupt and hungry — but awe-inspiring even in its fall.

The end came with the resignation of President Mikhail Gorbachev to make way for a new “Commonwealth of Independent States.”

At 7:32 p.m. (Moscow time) shortly after the conclusion of his televised address, the red flag with hammer-and-sickle was lowered over the Kremlin and the whiteblue-red Russian flag rose in its stead.

There was no ceremony, only the tolling of chimes from the Spassky Gate, cheers from a handful of surprised foreigners and an angry tirade from a war veteran.

Reactions to the death varied widely, according to Pravda, the former mouthpiece of the empire:

“Some joyfully exclaimf,i`nita la comedia!’ Others, heaping ash on their heads, raise their hands to the sky in horror and ask, what will be?”

The reaction depended somewhat on whether one listened to the ominous drumbeat of gunfire from Georgia, or watched the bitter if dignified surrender of power by the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Most people vacillated. The taboos and chains were gone, but so was the food. The Soviet Union had given them little, but there was no guarantee the strangesounding “Commonwealth of Independent States” would do any better.