The Real Dominos: The Soviet Union’s Sudden Collapse
At the dawn of the 1980s, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling desperately to keep the great USSR together. The public and international rhetoric was as self-confident as always, but more hollow than ever.
In the USA, a key plank of the American Vietnam War propaganda had been the fear of the “domino effect,” an inexorable one-by-one collapse of Southeast Asian nations to communist onslaught. The real domino-collapse came at the end of the 1980s, and not in Southeast Asia.The much vaunted solidarity of the Soviets began to look rather ragged. Political conflicts between the satellite Soviets and the Russian “mothership” began to grow serious. Gorbachev did not have Stalin’s stomach for brutal repression. Conflict grew into full blown nationalist agendas. It turned into a game of dare.
Estonia was the first Soviet socialist republic to declare itself a sovereign state in 1988, carefully hedging its bets by asserting its intention to remain in close fellowship. No reprisals happened. No armies were mobilized. Lithuania went next, declaring its independence from the Union in 1990. Southern caucasus and Georgia pulled within two months, and the entire Baltic region was out.
In 1991, an internal coup of horrified Russian hardliners failed to topple Gorbachev or halt the crumbling of Moscow’s power. Within the next few months, many of the remaining 11 Soviets pulled the trigger on the departure clause. Gorbachev was compelled by events to recognize the independence of the Baltic states in September 1991. The dominoes continued to go clattering down.
President Yeltsin of Russia, Chairman Shushkevich of Belarus, and President Kravchuk of Ukraine signed the Belavezha Accords on the 8th of December that year, and the USSR was almost gone. Kazakhstan was the last to depart, and that was it. No more USSR.
After all the relentless propaganda, after all the tortured confessions and executions, after all the extra-judicial murders and callous imprisonments, and after all the cruel exile of anybody who was the least suspicion of heterodoxy, the USSR was no more. The world was in shock. Russia was in shock. The battered former subaltern Soviets were filled with fierce nationalistic joy.