Perestrojka

From Moscowiki

Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985 and announced his policies of Perestrojka (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness). Gorbachev was a dynamic leader, full of new ideas and willingness to revitalize economics and make the Soviet Union more liberate. He was also the first Soviet politician to be welcomed abroad.

Gorbachev’s reforms made an immense impact on the system. For the first time during the Soviet period the elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies were not a complete profanation and contained an element of a true choice. In March 1990 the First Congress of National Deputies of the USSR declared a transition to the presidential system of governing and elected Mikhail Gorbachev as first President of the Soviet Union. The first and the last.

In 1990, the Soviet Union was about to collapse. Soviet republics declared their independence one after another. Boris Yeltsin was elected first President of the Russian Republic in 1991. An end to the existence of the Soviet Union was put after the military coup organized by Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov and Vice President Georgy Yanayev in August 1991. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, military units surrounded the building of Russian Government and tanks appeared in Moscow streets. But after three days this new provisional government was unseated, and Boris Yeltsin who stood against the tanks became a national hero. These events accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union and brought a new state into the world – the Russian Federation.