The glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) programme Mikhail Gorbachev pursued from 1985 was meant to revive the economy; what it released was the system's own critique. In 1989 the regimes of Eastern Europe fell one after another and the Baltic republics declared independence. In August 1991 a coup attempt by hardline officials collapsed in three days against resistance in the streets of Moscow and a divided army — and in the process thoroughly discredited the central authority it meant to preserve.

In December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the agreement declaring the union at an end; Gorbachev resigned on 25 December, and the following day the Supreme Soviet formally dissolved the state. The red flag came down over the Kremlin. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was by then spread across three further republics, and the decision of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to give up those weapons during the 1990s is among the least discussed and most consequential outcomes of the period.

The cost of the dissolution was heavy. Russia's national income fell by close to a third during the 1990s, male life expectancy dropped by six years, and the rapid privatisation of public assets created a new oligarchy. It left frozen conflicts across the Caucasus and Central Asia; for Turkey it opened direct relations with Azerbaijan and five Central Asian republics. Read in the West at the time as the end of history, the moment looks from here less like the closing of an order than the opening of a long transition whose borders and security architecture are still being argued over.