On 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned and announced the dissolution of the USSR. The red hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time and replaced with the Russian tricolour. The Cold War — which had shaped global politics, proxy wars, and the arms race for 44 years — was over.
The collapse had been accelerated by Gorbachev's reform policies of *glasnost* (openness) and *perestroika* (restructuring), which unleashed forces he could not control; the revolutions of 1989 that swept Eastern Europe; and the failed August 1991 hardliner coup that discredited the Communist Party. Fifteen independent republics emerged from the rubble of the world's largest country by land area.
President George H.W. Bush declared it "a victory for democracy and freedom." Russia inherited the USSR's nuclear arsenal and UN Security Council seat. For many in the former Soviet republics, the transition brought poverty, organised crime, and political instability rather than instant democracy — a complexity that shapes the region's politics to this day.