Lizbeth Hernandez
World History
Credit 10
1/28/15

Political World changes in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union

On Christmas day December 25th, 1991, at 7:25pm, Mikhail Gorbachev made a televised speech announcing his resignation as President of the Soviet Union. He declared his office null and void. He then gave the Soviet Nuclear missile codes to the new Russian president Boris Yelstin. The Russians then lowered the Soviet flag and raised the Russian tricolor. The very next day the USSR was officially dissolved and the Soviet Union disappeared from the world map. This was a result of political unrest among the Soviet people. During the 80’s the Soviet economy began to collapse. The country relied on inefficient factories and dated technology, while the people had to buy low-quality products and still suffered from little to no social freedoms. The Soviet people were becoming increasingly frustrated by this. Which led to Mikhail Gorbachev coming to power, and him promoting his policy of “Glasnost “or “openness “.The Russians lost direct control over a lot of territory. They lost control of over one third of the former Soviet territory. These areas held over half of the former Soviet population at the time of the brake of the Soviet Union. This was followed by the collapse of former Soviet economic ties. Large-scale economic disaster fell on the newly formed Russia. This fall was said to be even worse than the “great depression “ that hit Americans in the early 1900’s.the fall of the Soviet economy didn’t only affect the newly formed Russia. It hit the Cuban economy hard, the Cubans lost over 80% of its imports and exports with the collapse. Also their overall gross domestic product dropped by 34%. Also it caused a complete implosion of the North Korean economy. In China, the news of the soviet fall was received with mixed feelings. Some people were shocked for the Soviet Union and profoundly regretted its disintegration. Others believed that, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the threat to China from the north was gone. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was the most important global event toward the end of the 20th century. It changed the world. Twenty years later, it is time to look back and reflect on the world has changed since then. After World War II, the world was divided into two camps, the socialist camp headed by the Soviet Union, and the capitalist camp headed by the United States. For more than 40 years, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was known throughout the world. The United States and the Soviet Union, according to some estimates, spent at least $20 trillion on building their nuclear arsenals and improving their military hardware. Each of their nuclear arsenals was so powerful that they could have destroyed our planet many times over. That led the world to a dangerous situation, what people called a “balance of terror” and “MAD” (mutual assured destruction). The world lived under permanent threat of nuclear war. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in rivalry and confrontation. They confronted each other everywhere. It was a zero-sum game — when