In his resignation address in December 1991, Gorbachev referred to the "suffocating shackles of the Soviet Union's bureaucratic command system". What was Gorbachev's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union? We start the story with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the signature event of the end of the Cold War, but we also look at how the Soviet Union arrived at the point where they would (or could) no longer assert their power of countries in Eastern Europe. We assess Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost and how he set events in motion of which he could no longer control the outcome. We consider what happened in Poland in the 1980's and how a new and democratic Solidarity government rose to power and how this fueled democratic revolutions across Eastern Europe. We also take a look at the rise of Boris Yeltsin in Russia and his stand-off with the new Russian parliament.
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