WHO REALLY DESTROYED THE USSR? YELTSIN REVEALED THE WHOLE TRUTH

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]December the 8th, 1991. The Bellavvesia forest. Snow pressed heavy against the windows of the Viscouli hunting lodge, and the heating inside couldn't chase away the cold that had settled into the walls, or maybe into the moment itself.

[00:00:15]Three men sat at a table, three signatures, three strokes of the pen, and just like that, a country ceased to exist. Boris Yeltson, Leoned Kravchuk, Stannislav, Shushkovich. Their names will echo through history, not as heroes, not necessarily as villains, but as the three men who were present when the largest country on Earth was quietly folded up like a map no longer needed.

[00:00:40]No war defeated it. No foreign army had marched into Moscow. No catastrophic famine had broken the population's will to survive. The Soviet Union with its nuclear arsenal, its space program, its sprawling 11 time zones, its 300 million citizens simply stopped.

[00:01:03]Signed away in a building that most people couldn't have found on a map in a forest that belonged to no one in particular over the course of a single night. And here's the thing that history books tend to gloss over, the detail that gets buried beneath dates and diplomatic language. Just nine months before those three men picked up their pens, the Soviet people had been asked directly. A referendum, the first and last of its kind in Soviet history, put the question plainly, "Do you want to preserve the union?" 77% said yes. 77% of an entire civilization voted to keep living together, to keep sharing the same flag, the same currency, the same future. More than 150 million people said, "We choose this." It didn't matter. Three men with pins overruled them all. This is not a story about geopolitics in the abstract. This is not a dry academic exercise in constitutional theory or late socialist economics.

[00:02:06]This is a story about how one of the most powerful nations in human history was dismantled.

[00:02:12]And the question that haunts every serious researcher who has spent time in the archives, who has read the declassified cables, who has tracked the money in the meetings and the midnight phone calls. Is this was it an accident?

[00:02:26]Was it inevitable? Or was it a plan? To answer that, we cannot start here in this frozen forest in December. We have to go back back to the moment when the walls first began to crack from the inside. Back to a spring morning in 1985 when a man with a birth mark on his forehead stepped to the podium of the Communist Party and smiled at the cameras with the confidence of someone who believed he was about to save something. Or perhaps with the confidence of someone who already knew what he was about to do. But before we go there, stay with this image for a moment longer. The lodge at Visculi, the three signatures, the snow outside. Why?

[00:03:08]Because everything that follows, every policy decision, every protest, every broken promise, every economic collapse, every midnight negotiation, every suspicious silence, all of it was moving toward this room, toward this table, toward this moment. When three men without asking the 150 million people who had already answered the question decided the answer for them. History rarely announces itself. It doesn't send a warning shot. The most consequential moments in human civilization tend to arrive quietly in a hunting lodge over tea with a pen that scratches across paper and changes everything. The fall of the Roman Empire didn't happen in a single battle. The end of the British Empire wasn't a single treaty. And the dissolution of the Soviet Union wasn't the chaotic, spontaneous collapse that official narratives would have you believe. Collapses of this magnitude require architecture.

[00:04:08]They require planning, timing, and most importantly, they require people in the right places at the right moment, making decisions that look improvised, but feel in retrospect almost choreographed.

[00:04:21]Consider what we know.

[00:04:23]The Soviet Union in the early 1980s was not a dying organism. Inconvenient as that fact may be for certain narratives, the numbers tell a different story. The country had minimal foreign debt compared to Western nations. Its military budget was formidable. Its scientific and engineering infrastructure had put the first human being in space and continued to produce advances that Western intelligence agencies tracked with genuine anxiety.

[00:04:51]Its energy reserves, the oil and natural gas buried beneath Siberia were among the largest on the planet. This was not a house of cards waiting for a breeze.

[00:05:01]This was a concrete structure that would require something more deliberate to bring down.

[00:05:08]And then between 1985 and 1991, a span of just 6 years, it was gone. 6 years.

[00:05:17]For context, it took Rome centuries to fall. The Ottoman Empire spent decades in decline. The British Empire negotiated its own retreat over generations. But the Soviet Union, the second superpower of the 20th century, dissolved in roughly the same amount of time it takes a child to finish primary school. The official explanation is familiar. Economic stagnation, the burden of the arms race, ethnic tensions that had been suppressed for decades, a system too rigid to reform. These factors were real. Nobody serious disputes their existence, but factors and causes are different things. A man standing next to an open window in winter will get cold, but he only falls out if someone pushes him. The question is not whether there were problems. The question is who opened the window? Who removed the guard rail and who was standing behind him?

[00:06:15]That question leads us to the beginning to the policies that look in isolation like a series of well-intentioned mistakes. But when you lay them side by side, when you trace the timeline from the anti-alcohol campaign of 1985 to the night of the Bellasia signatures, what emerges is something that looks less like a sequence of errors and more like a sequence of steps. Steps taken by specific people, steps that went in a specific direction, steps that ended in a specific place. This investigation will take you through six chapters of the most consequential political story of the 20th century's final decade. We will follow the evidence where it leads.

[00:06:58]We will ask the questions that official histories have preferred to leave unanswered. We will name names, trace funding, examine documents, and sit with the uncomfortable conclusions that emerge when you stop accepting the story you were given and start reading the story that actually happened.

[00:07:19]Because here's what we know for certain.

[00:07:20]On March 17th, 1991, 150 million people voted to keep their country alive. On December 8th of the same year, three men killed it. Anyway, between those two dates, between that vote and those three signatures, something happened.

[00:07:37]something systematic. Something that touched economics, politics, intelligence, media, ethnic conflict, and international diplomacy all at once.

[00:07:48]Something too coordinated to be called coincidence and too wide ranging to be the work of accident alone. What was it?

[00:07:56]Who built it and who gave the order? Go back with us. Go back to 1985 to a general secretary who arrived with a smile and a reform agenda. to a country that had no idea it was about to be taken apart piece by piece. Go back to the moment before the end when the end had already been decided. It just hadn't been announced yet. The story of how the Soviet Union died is not the story you know.

[00:08:24]The story you know is the one that was written for you after the fact.

[00:08:28]assembled from selected facts and convenient omissions by people who had every reason to control the narrative.

[00:08:35]This is the other story. The one assembled from the archive documents, the declassified intelligence files, the memoirs written in old age when the architects of collapse finally felt safe enough to let certain things slip. The one you piece together not from official statements, but from the gap between what was said and what was done. We begin at the beginning. We begin with the man who was handed the keys to the most powerful socialist state in history and what he chose to do with the March 1985.

[00:09:08]Mikail Sergeovich Gorbachov stands before the Pit Bureau and accepts the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[00:09:17]He's 54 years old. He's the youngest man to hold this office in decades.

[00:09:24]He smiles easily, speaks in complete sentences without reading from prepared notes, and projects an energy that the Soviet system hadn't seen since the early Kruch.

[00:09:36]The party elders who selected him believed they were choosing a reformer, someone who would modernize the machinery without dismantling the engine, someone who would fix the leaks without tearing down the house. Within 6 years, there was no house left.

[00:09:51]The first major policy initiative of the Gorbachev era was not glass nost. It was not paristroka. It was vodka or rather the campaign against it. In May 1985, just 2 months into his tenure, Gorbachoff launched one of the most aggressive anti-alcohol campaigns in Soviet history. Vineyards in Georgia and Muldova, some of the oldest in the world, cultivated across centuries, were ordered destroyed. Production quotas for alcohol were slashed. Retail outlets were shuttered. The legal sale of spirits was restricted to limited hours and limited locations.

[00:10:30]On the surface, this looked like a public health initiative. The Soviet Union genuinely had a serious problem with alcohol consumption, productivity losses, family breakdown, reduced life expectancy, particularly among working age men. Nobody could argue with the stated goal. And that is precisely what made the campaign so effective as a political instrument. It was impossible to oppose without appearing to defend alcoholism. But look at the numbers. In the first 3 years of the campaign alone, the Soviet state budget lost somewhere in the range of 100 billion rubles in alcohol tax revenue. 100 billion rubles.

[00:11:08]In an economy that was already under pressure from falling global oil prices, the black market for homemade spirits exploded. Sugar disappeared from storeshelves as people began brewing their own.

[00:11:23]The campaign achieved almost none of its stated health objectives while successfully draining a massive stream of reliable state income at precisely the moment when the state could least afford to lose it. Was this incompetence? Perhaps. But watch what happens next. In the same period, 1985 through 1988, Gorbachev undertook what can only be described as a systematic replacement of the Soviet regional leadership structure. By some estimates, more than 70% of regional party secretaries were replaced during this window. 70% men who had spent their careers building local power bases, who understood their territories, who had networks of loyalty and information reaching down to the factory floor and the collective farm. Gone, replaced with newer appointments, many of whom lacked the institutional roots to manage the increasingly tense situations developing in places like the Caucases, the Baltic states, and Central Asia.

[00:12:27]When you remove the people who know where the wires are, you should not be surprised when the lights go out. The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 revealed something even more troubling.

[00:12:39]The explosion at reactor number four occurred in the early hours of April 26th. For approximately 72 hours, three full days, the Soviet leadership said almost nothing publicly. The initial response was characterized by exactly the kind of opacity that Gorbachoff would later claim to be dismantling through glass nost. People in Pryot were not evacuated immediately. The Mayday parade in Kiev proceeded as scheduled with children marching through streets while radioactive particles drifted through the air. Three days of silence and then paradoxically Chernobyl became the founding argument for Glassnost for the policy of openness that Gorbachov would use to fundamentally alter the Soviet Union's relationship with its own history, its own institutions and its own people.

[00:13:31]This is worth sitting with. The disaster happened, the silence happened, and then the silence was used as justification for a communications revolution that would within five years completely transform Soviet political culture.

[00:13:45]Researchers who have studied this sequence closely have noted the almost perfect rhetorical utility of the timeline. A catastrophe caused by secrecy becomes the argument for openness, and openness becomes the tool through which the system is delegitimized.

[00:14:02]Glassnost as it actually functioned between 1986 and 1991 was not simply a policy of transparency. It was a controlled demolition of Soviet institutional confidence. Publications that had been suppressed for decades were suddenly permitted. The crimes of Stalin real documented horrifying were exposed in graphic detail across Soviet media.

[00:14:28]The history of collectivization, the purges, the goolag system, the famine years, all of it poured into public consciousness simultaneously without context, without the kind of measured historical reckoning that might have allowed citizens to process the past without concluding that everything their country had ever been was a lie. Every nation has crimes in its history. The United States has slavery and the extermination of indigenous peoples.

[00:14:56]Britain has centuries of colonial violence. France has Algeria. Germany has confronted its past with particular intensity. But in every one of those cases, the reckoning happened gradually within a framework that preserved some sense of national continuity and institutional legitimacy. What happened in the Soviet Union under glass no was different. It was total, simultaneous, and critically it was not balanced with any honest accounting of Soviet achievements. The space program was not elevated alongside the Goolag.

[00:15:32]The industrial transformation that had taken a largely agrarian society and made it a nuclear superpower in 40 years was not weighed against the collectivization famines. The complete picture was not the point.

[00:15:45]Delegitimization was the point. A population that has been taught to distrust every institution it has ever known is a population that will not resist when those institutions are dismantled. Now look at the external dimension because it is here that the picture becomes most difficult to explain away as coincidence. Gorbachev's foreign policy between 1985 and 1988 was characterized by a series of unilateral concessions to the West that stunned even sympathetic Western observers. The withdrawal from Afghanistan completed by February 1989 was presented as a principled retreat from an unwininnable conflict. Fine.

[00:16:26]Most serious analysts agreed the war had become a strategic burden.

[00:16:33]But the manner of the withdrawal, without securing any meaningful political guarantees for the Afghan government the Soviets had supported, without extracting concessions from Washington on related issues, suggested something beyond pragmatism. Then came the question of German reunification.

[00:16:50]When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the question of whether a reunified Germany would remain in NATO was among the most consequential geopolitical questions of the 20th century's final decade. Soviet security doctrine had been built for 40 years around the assumption that Germany, the country that had invaded Soviet territory twice in 30 years, the country whose armies had reached the outskirts of Moscow and laid siege to Lennengrad for nearly 900 days, would not be permitted to rearm as part of a western military alliance. This was not an abstract diplomatic preference.

[00:17:31]This was from the Soviet perspective an existential security guarantee purchased with 27 million lives. Gorbachev gave it away, not in exchange for a formal treaty commitment that NATO would not expand eastward. No such treaty was ever signed, a fact that would become bitterly relevant in subsequent decades.

[00:17:50]He accepted verbal assurances, promises made in conversations and meetings documented in diplomatic cables, but never codified in binding international law. Secretary of State James Baker's famous formulation that NATO would move not one in eastward, was a spoken reassurance, not a signed agreement.

[00:18:10]Gorbachev accepted it anyway. What did the Soviet Union receive in exchange for allowing Germany to reunify within NATO?

[00:18:19]Economically, Western credits that arrived slowly, partially, and with conditions. Politically, praise, goodwill, and Gorbachoff's growing celebrity in Western capitals.

[00:18:29]Militarily, nothing that altered the fundamental balance of power.

[00:18:36]Strategically, a promise that within 3 years of being made was already being quietly set aside as the first discussions about NATO's eastern expansion began. The scholars who defend Gorbachev argue that he had no choice, that the Soviet economy was too weak to sustain confrontation, that the population's appetite for reform was genuine and unstoppable, that the nationalist movements in the republics had their own momentum, that no leader could have reversed. These are serious arguments made by serious people, and they deserve engagement rather than dismissal. But here's the counterargument, and it is equally serious. In the mid 1980s, the Soviet Union's foreign debt was remarkably low by international standards. Its gold reserves, while diminished, were not exhausted. Its military capabilities remained fully intact.

[00:19:32]China facing analogous pressures for political reform in the same period chose a different path. Economic opening combined with firm political control.

[00:19:42]And that choice preserved the state. The Soviet Union was not facing the same constraints as say Poland or Hungary. It was the core of the system with the resources and the institutional capacity to manage a slower, more controlled transition. The choice not to manage it that way was a choice. It was made by specific people and it produced specific outcomes that benefited specific parties. By 1988, the regional party apparatus had been hollowed out. The state budget had been bled by the anti-alcohol campaign and falling oil revenues. The Soviet population had been subjected to three years of institutional delegitimization through glass nost. The military and KGB had watched their institutional authority and morale steadily erode.

[00:20:34]and the international concessions had signaled to every interested party in Washington, in London, in the newly emboldened capitals of Eastern Europe that the Soviet leadership would not fight to preserve the empire it had spent 70 years constructing. The structure was ready. The next phase could begin because what came after 1988 was not a continuation of the same process. It was an acceleration. The nationalist fires that had been smoldering in the caucuses and the Baltic states were about to ignite and the central government that might have contained them had been systematically weakened in ways that by this point looked less and less like accident. In Nagorno Carabach, in the streets of Bissi, in the parliament buildings of Vnius and Ria and Talon, the next chapter of the dissolution was being written, and the question of whether Moscow was losing control or surrendering it was about to become impossible to avoid.

[00:21:35]There is a pattern that historians of empire have noted across centuries and continents. When a multithnic state begins to weaken at the center, the periphery does not simply drift away on its own. It is pulled. And the pulling requires hands, external hands, working through local proxies, funding local grievances, amplifying local voices that might otherwise have remained regional and manageable. The dissolution of empires is rarely purely organic. It is almost always assisted. By 1988, the Soviet periphery was on fire, and the central government in Moscow, the government that had just 3 years earlier commanded the loyalty of the largest land army on Earth and the obedience of 11 time zones, watched it burn with a passivity that defied every instinct of institutional self-preservation.

[00:22:30]begin in Nagorno Carabach.

[00:22:35]This small mountainous enclave, majority Armenian and population administratively part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, had been a frozen territorial dispute for decades. The Soviet system had managed this tension through the same mechanism it managed all ethnic tensions. Firm central authority suppression of nationalist expression and the overriding identity of Soviet citizenship that was meant to supersede ethnic allegiance. The system was imperfect. The resentments were real, but they had been contained. In February 1988, they stopped being contained. The regional parliament of Nagorno Carabach voted to request transfer to Armenian jurisdiction. Within days, demonstrations broke out in Yeravan.

[00:23:20]Within weeks, violence erupted in the Azerbaijani city of Sung, a city with a significant Armenian population. People died, families fled.

[00:23:33]The inner ethnic coexistence that had defined Soviet life in the Caucases for generations began to fracture along lines that once opened would prove impossible to close. Moscow's response was slow, conspicuously, almost inexplicably slow. The apparatus of a state that had mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops within days during previous crises. Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 took weeks to deploy meaningful orderkeeping forces to a region that was visibly descending into communal violence. By the time federal authority asserted itself, the damage was done. Not just the physical damage, the deaths, the displacement, the destroyed property, but the psychological damage, the damage to the idea that Moscow could protect people.

[00:24:24]that the Union meant something in practical terms when things got dangerous. The signal sent to every other restive republic was clear. Even if the center hesitates, the center can be pushed. The ye in April 1989, Soviet troops dispersed a demonstration into Bissi, Georgia. The operation was heavy-handed. People died.

[00:24:47]And what should have been a straightforward, if tragic, assertion of central authority became instead a political catastrophe for Moscow.

[00:24:56]Because Gorbachoff's own advisers, his own government immediately began distancing themselves from the decision, publicly questioning who had given the orders, feeding a narrative of internal chaos and unaccountable military action that further eroded the legitimacy of central power. The Georgian nationalist movement, rather than being dampened by the Tibilisi events, was supercharged by them. Within a year, the Georgian Parliament would be on a path toward declaring independence.

[00:25:28]The same dynamic played out in the Baltic states, but with a crucial difference. in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The organizational infrastructure of independence movements was more sophisticated, better funded, and more deeply connected to Western support networks than anything in the Caucases. The Baltic diaspora communities in the United States and Western Europe had spent decades maintaining political pressure on Western governments to never formally recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States as legitimate. This was not a secret. It was official American policy maintained across administrations, a consistent diplomatic position that kept the legal question of Baltic sovereignty technically open throughout the entire Cold War period.

[00:26:13]What changed in the late 1980s was that this political position was joined by something more active.

[00:26:22]research into the funding streams of Baltic independence organizations during this period drawing on declassified national endowment for democracy documents, State Department cables in the records of various immigrate organizations reveals a significant increase in financial and organizational support flowing from Western sources to Baltic civil society and political movements beginning around 1987 and escalating sharply through 1988 and 1989. The National Endowment for Democracy, established by the United States Congress in 1983 with the explicit mission of promoting democracy abroad, directed substantial resources toward Eastern European and Baltic organizations throughout this period.

[00:27:06]This was not covert. The NE operated openly, published annual reports, and its congressional mandate was a matter of public record.

[00:27:18]But the scale of engagement and the timing of its escalation deserve more attention than they typically receive in standard histories of the Soviet collapse. The singing revolution, the extraordinary series of mass demonstrations in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to sing national folk songs as acts of political resistance, was one of the most genuinely moving popular movements of the 20th century.

[00:27:46]The emotion was real.

[00:27:48]The desire for independence was real.

[00:27:50]The historical grievances rooted in the experience of Soviet occupation were real and legitimate. None of this is in question. But real popular movements and externally assisted popular movements are not mutually exclusive categories. A genuine flame can still be fanned by an external wind. The question is not whether the Baltic peoples wanted independence. They clearly did.

[00:28:19]The question is who provided the organizational infrastructure, the communications equipment, the legal advice, the international media connections, and the financial resources that transformed a cultural resistance movement into a coordinated political campaign capable of challenging a nuclear superpower. Meanwhile, in Central Asia, the violence took a different and darker form. In June 1990, interethnic clashes in the Fergana Valley of Usuzbekiststan, particularly in the city of Osh, straddling the Usuzbekis border, resulted in hundreds of deaths and the displacement of tens of thousands of people. Once again, the pattern repeated. Local tensions that had existed for decades suddenly erupted with an intensity that the central authorities seemed unprepared to manage.

[00:29:07]Once again, the federal response was slow, uncertain, and ultimately insufficient to restore the sense of Soviet order and protection that had previously kept these tensions below the surface.

[00:29:22]The KGB, the Committee for State Security, the organization that had for decades served as the nervous system of Soviet internal security, capable of monitoring, infiltrating, and neutralizing dissident movements with ruthless efficiency. Appeared during this critical period to be operating at a fraction of its historical capacity.

[00:29:45]Former senior KGB officers who spoke in later years to journalists and researchers described an institution that had been effectively paralyzed from above. Not disbanded, not reformed, not redirected, paralyzed. Operations that would previously have been routine were being held up at the approval level.

[00:30:04]Intelligence about foreign funding of nationalist organizations was being compiled but not acted upon. The institutional reflex to protect the state was somehow being overridden by signals coming from the political leadership. This is where the internal and external narratives converge into a single story. November 1989.

[00:30:28]The Berlin Wall falls. The images go around the world. East Germans stream through checkpoints that border guards receiving no orders to stop them simply allow to open. Within weeks, the entire architecture of the eastern block, the system of Soviet aligned states that had defined European geopolitics for 40 years is visibly crumbling. Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, one by one, the communist governments that Moscow had installed and maintained are being swept away or negotiating their own exits. Gorbachev watches and does not intervene. The Brev Doctrine, the Soviet policy established after the Prague Spring of 1968, that the USSR reserved the right to intervene militarily in socialist countries where socialism itself was threatened, is quietly abandoned, not formally renounced in a major speech or treaty, simply not applied.

[00:31:28]The doctrine that had justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that had kept Poland's solidarity movement from fully prevailing in the early 1980s, that had served as the ultimate guarantee underwriting Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Gone, retired without ceremony. And then came Malta. In December 1989, Gorbachev met with President George HW Bush on warships anchored off the coast of Malta. The meeting was informal by design. No grand treaty signing, no formal agenda, no binding commitments, but the symbolism was unmistakable and the substance reconstructed from diplomatic records and memoirs published afterward was remarkable. Gorbachev effectively signaled that the Soviet Union would not resist the transformation of Eastern Europe.

[00:32:20]He accepted the western framing of events that democracy was simply prevailing over communism that the people were speaking and their governments were responding without extracting any meaningful strategic concession in return. Former Soviet diplomats who served in the foreign ministry during this period have described a sensation in the months following Malta of institutional freefall. The parameters within which they had operated. The fundamental assumption that Soviet strategic interests in Eastern Europe would be defended had been removed without replacement. They were continuing to staff embassies, write cables, attend meetings, but the policy framework that gave those activities, meaning it silently dissolved. Western governments reading these signals accurately began recalibrating accordingly. The question was no longer whether Soviet influence in Eastern Europe would survive. It was how quickly it would end and what would replace it.

[00:33:20]And increasingly the more ambitious voices in Western policy circles were beginning to ask a further question. If the Eastern block could go, what about the Union itself? By the end of 1989, the dual pressure on the Soviet Union had reached a new phase inside 11 republics in various stages of nationalist mobilization. a hollowedout party apparatus, a demoralized security structure, and a population that had spent 4 years being told that everything their institutions had ever claimed was suspect. outside a western policy community that had moved from hoping to manage Soviet decline to actively contemplating Soviet dissolution and a network of funded organizations, immigrate networks, and newly emboldened local movements, providing the organizational capacity to make dissolution a practical possibility rather than an abstract aspiration. The man at the center of it all continued to smile for the cameras, continued to give interviews to Western journalists who described him with admiration, continued to collect honorary degrees and international prizes, continued to make concessions that his own military and intelligence establishment regarded with mounting horror. And in the republics, the fires that had been lit in Carabach and Tibelisi and the Baltic capitals in 1988 were spreading. The next question was no longer whether the periphery would hold.

[00:34:49]The next question was whether the core itself, Russia, the heart of the union, would produce its own gravedigger. It already had. He had already been humiliated, already been pushed out, and already begun his return. His name was Boris Yeltson. And the story of how a disgraced party official became the man who would sign the death certificate of the Soviet Union is perhaps the most extraordinary political rehabilitation in modern history.

[00:35:20]There is a particular kind of political anger that is more dangerous than ideological conviction. Ideological conviction can be argued with, negotiated around, gradually worn down by compromise and concession. But personal humiliation, the kind that burns in a man's chest at 3 in the morning, that replays itself in the mind with perfect clarity years after the fact, that transforms a pragmatic politician into something closer to a force of nature. That kind of anger does not negotiate. It waits. It accumulates.

[00:35:54]And when the moment arrives, it does not settle for half measures. Boris Nikolia Yeltson was humiliated in October 1987.

[00:36:03]The setting was a central committee plenum, a closed meeting of the Soviet Union senior party leadership.

[00:36:13]Yeltson, who had been brought to Moscow by Gorbachev himself two years earlier and appointed head of the Moscow City Party organization, stood up and delivered a speech that criticized the pace of reform and more dangerously questioned the growing cult of personality developing around Raisa Gorbacheva, the general secretary's wife. The speech was clumsy, the timing was terrible, the room went cold. What followed was a ritual of Soviet political destruction that had been refined across decades. One by one, members of the central committee stood and denounced Yeltson. Not just his speech, him, his character, his judgment, his fitness for leadership, his arrogance, his instability.

[00:36:57]Gorbachev, who might have intervened, who might have moderated the session, who had after all personally elevated this man and could have protected him, sat and watched.

[00:37:09]When Yeltson suffered what appears to have been a stress related physical episode in the weeks following, collapsing and requiring hospitalization, he was brought from his hospital bed to face further criticism before being removed from his positions.

[00:37:23]The message was clear. In the Soviet system, when the general secretary withdraws his protection, you're finished. Except Yeltson was not finished. And that fact alone, the fact that a man so thoroughly destroyed by the party apparatus could not only survive but return to dominate Soviet and then Russian politics within 3 years. Tells you something important about how fundamentally the rules had changed. In the old system, in the Brev years, in the Kruch years, Yeltson's career would have ended in that plenum room. He would have been dispatched to manage a cement factory in Siberia and spent the rest of his life in comfortable obscurity.

[00:38:05]The system had mechanisms for permanent removal that it had applied consistently for six decades. Those mechanisms no longer functioned because Glassnosst had opened a door that the party could not control, the door of popular legitimacy.

[00:38:21]And Boris Yeltson, stripped of his party positions, walked straight throughout through it. He ran for a seat in the new Congress of People's Deputies. In March 1989, the legislative body that Gorbachev had created as part of his political reforms. Yeltson ran in a Moscow district. He received nearly 90% of the vote. 90% in a city of 9 million people in a country where competitive elections were a novelty so new it barely had a name yet. A man who had been publicly destroyed by the party establishment 18 months earlier walked back into the halls of power on the shoulders of popular will. The party had no answer for this.

[00:39:03]The system had been redesigned by Gorbachoff's own reforms in a way that created a legitimate alternative source of authority, electoral legitimacy that could compete with and potentially override party appointment. Whether Gorbachev understood what he had created or whether he believed he could manage it is a question that his memoirs answer only partially and his actions answer not at all convincingly. By 1990, Yeltson had been elected to the parliament of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the largest and most populous of the 15 Soviet republics, the one that contained Moscow, Lennengrad, Siberia, the Urals, the bulk of the Soviet Union's natural resources and more than half of its population. In June of that year, he was elected chairman of the Russian Parliament. And on June 12th, 1990, the Russian Parliament, the Parliament of a Republic, that was itself the core of the Soviet Union, passed a declaration of state sovereignty.

[00:40:08]Rid that again slowly, Russia, not Estonia, not Georgia, not Ukraine, but Russia itself, declared that its laws took precedence over Soviet laws within its territory. The foundation stone of the union had declared itself sovereign from the structure it was supposed to be holding up. It was as if the loadbearing wall of a building had announced it was no longer interested in bearing loads.

[00:40:35]This was the first legal blow against the Soviet Union. And it was struck not by a separatist movement on the periphery, but by Russia itself, by the men who ran Russia's newly empowered parliamentary institutions, led by a man who had been humiliated by Gorbachev 3 years earlier, and had spent every day since accumulating the popular support and institutional position he would need to settle the account. Now, examine the people surrounding Yeltson during this period.

[00:41:06]Gennady Berbulis, a philosophy lecturer from Serdlowsk who became Yeltson's chief political strategist and ideological architect. Jaor Guer, an economist whose ideas about rapid market liberalization had been developed in close dialogue with Western economic institutions, including extended contact with researchers affiliated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Anatoli Chubay, another economist who would later oversee the privatization program that transferred Soviet state assets into private hands with a speed and opacity that produced a new class of billionaires while simultaneously destroying the savings of ordinary citizens. These men were not products of the Soviet system in the way that the old party elite were products of it.

[00:41:58]They had formed their intellectual frameworks in explicit opposition to Soviet economic doctrine and they had done so with access to western economic literature, western institutional contacts and in some cases western funding for research and travel that was unusual for Soviet academics of their generation. This does not make them foreign agents. It makes them men whose worldview had been shaped at least in part by external intellectual and institutional influences that aligned closely with the interests of western governments and financial institutions.

[00:42:32]When Yeltson's team talked about reform, they did not mean what Gorbachev meant by reform. They meant transformation, rapid, total, irreversible transformation of the Soviet economic and political system into something that looked like what Western advisers recommended.

[00:42:53]And the Western advisers who arrived in Moscow in increasing numbers through 1990 and 1991 were not subtle about what they recommended. Speed above all. Move fast. Create facts on the ground. make the changes irreversible before political opposition can organize. This advice, sometimes called shock therapy, sometimes dressed in more neutral academic language, was given to people who had every political incentive to move fast. Because moving fast was also how you consolidated personal power before rivals could respond. The interests aligned perfectly. Western institutions wanted rapid liberalization. Yeltson's team wanted to move too fast for Gorbachev to stop them. The result was a political and economic program that served both agendas simultaneously. And then came August 1991, the event that in official memory is remembered as the moment hardliners tried to save the Soviet Union and the Russian people rose up to stop them.

[00:43:58]Look at what actually happened on the morning of August 19th. A group calling itself the state committee on the state of emergency announced that Gorbachev had been removed from power due to health reasons. He was at his DACA in Crimea where he would later claim to have been held under house arrest and that the committee was assuming control.

[00:44:19]The committee consisted of senior figures from the Soviet government, the vice president, the prime minister, the defense minister, the KGB chairman, the interior minister. These were not fringe figures. These were the men who ran the Soviet state's core institutions. If any group in the Soviet Union had the organizational capacity to execute a successful seizure of power, it was this group. They had the military. They had the security services. They had the administrative apparatus. They had everything required. And they failed completely.

[00:44:56]not just failed. They failed in ways that suggest to any serious analyst who examines the timeline that failure may have been the intended outcome. Consider the specific anomalies.

[00:45:08]On the morning of the coup, Boris Yeltson was at his DACA outside Moscow.

[00:45:13]He was the single most important political opponent of the committee, the man whose removal was essential to any successful seizure of power. He was not arrested, not even approached. And he was left free to drive to the Russian Parliament building, the White House, where he climbed onto a tank in front of television cameras and delivered the speech that became the defining image of the coup's defeat. The cameras were there. The moment was perfect. It could not have been better staged. The tank sent to Moscow did not receive orders to move against the White House. Soldiers sat in their vehicles for hours and then days without instructions talking to the Muscovites who brought them food and flowers.

[00:45:57]Military units that could have ended the standoff in minutes received no commands. The KGB's elite alpha group trained specifically for exactly this kind of domestic security operation was ordered to storm the White House. And then the order was either withdrawn or never properly issued depending on which account you read. The state television and radio infrastructure, the broadcast system that in any serious coup attempt is seized within the first hour because controlling information is the first requirement of controlling a population was not taken over. Independent radio stations continued to broadcast. CNN and other Western outlets continued to report. The international community watched in real time as the coup visibly collapsed. Three people died during the entire event. Three, in a country with hundreds of thousands of armed security personnel, with tanks in the streets of the capital, with the entire institutional apparatus of the Soviet state nominally under the committee's control, three people died.

[00:47:02]Either the committee was the most incompetent collection of senior official in the history of statecraft, or the operation was never designed to succeed. If it was designed to fail, the question becomes, who designed it that way and why? The answer that a number of serious researchers, including former senior Soviet and Russian intelligence officers, who spoke on the record in the years following have proposed is this.

[00:47:28]The coup was allowed to happen, managed to fail, and used to destroy the remaining institutional legitimacy of the Soviet state.

[00:47:39]By the time it was over, the Communist Party had been suspended. Gorbachev's authority was shattered beyond recovery, and Yeltson stood in the ruins as the only figure with both popular legitimacy and institutional power. Every obstacle to the final dissolution had been cleared. Within 4 months, the Soviet Union would be gone. The stage was set.

[00:48:01]The actors were in position. The script, whether written in advance or assembled in real time from the opportunities that presented themselves, was reaching its final scene. And that final scene would be played out not in Moscow, not in a session of the Supreme Soviet, not in any of the formal institutions that might have given it democratic legitimacy, but in a hunting lodge in a forest on the border between Russia and Barus, where three men would gather in secret to do what 150 million people had already said they did not want done.

[00:48:36]There is a moment in the life of every major historical event when it stops being a process and becomes a decision.

[00:48:43]Months of drift, years of accumulated pressure, the slow erosion of institutions and legitimacy and will all of it can reverse, slow down, change direction right up until the moment when specific people in a specific room make a specific choice and put their names to it. After that moment, the past is rewritten. What had seemed like one of several possible futures becomes the only future that ever existed. History closes around the decision like water closing over a stone. That moment came on the weekend of December the 7th and 8th, 1991.

[00:49:22]And it came not in a government building, not in a parliament, not in any space designed for the exercise of legitimate authority, but in a hunting lodge in the Bellasia forest, a dense ancient woodland straddling the border between Russia and Bellarus, famous for its population of European bison, and for the near total silence that falls over it in winter, when the snow is heavy and the roads in are barely passable, and the rest of the world feels very far way. The choice of location was not accidental. Nothing about what happened that weekend was accidental. Go back one week. By the first days of December 1991, the political situation in the Soviet Union had reached a condition that can only be described as suspended collapse. The August coup had destroyed Gorbachoff's authority without formally removing him.

[00:50:16]He retained the title of president of the Soviet Union, continued to inhabit the Kremlin, continued to meet with foreign leaders and sign documents and give speeches, but the institutional substance of his power had evaporated.

[00:50:30]The Communist Party, the organizational spine of Soviet governance for 70 years, had been suspended after the coup. The KGB had been restructured and was in the process of being broken apart. The military high command was demoralized and unclear about where its ultimate loyalty should lie. The republics were in various stages of independence, declaration, or negotiation.

[00:50:54]Ukraine was the key. This was understood by everyone who was thinking seriously about the union's fate in the autumn of 1991.

[00:51:05]Without Ukraine, with its 50 million people, its industrial base in the Dawnbass, its agricultural heartland, its Black Sea ports, its share of the Soviet military's conventional forces and nuclear infrastructure.

[00:51:20]Any reconstituted union was geographically and politically incoherent. Russia and the Central Asian republics alone could not constitute a union in any meaningful sense. Ukraine was not simply the second largest Soviet republic. It was in terms of the union's viability the loadbearing republic. Take Ukraine out and the structure falls. On December 1st, 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence. 90% voted yes. Not the narrow majority that might have left room for negotiation. Not the slim plurality that could be attributed to nationalist zealatry in western Ukraine alone. 90% across every region of the republic, including the heavily Russian-speaking east and south that would decades later become contested territory.

[00:52:12]The result was unambiguous. Ukraine was leaving. Yeltson called Leonid Kravchuk the president of Ukraine within hours of the result. The content of that conversation, reconstructed from memoirs and later interviews, was straightforward. Given this result, what is the point of the Union Treaty that Gorbachev had been laboriously negotiating for months? Gorbachev's entire political project at this point was the New Union Treaty, a revised framework that would transform the Soviet Union into a looser confederation while preserving some form of common state. He had spent the autumn in exhausting negotiations with the republic leaders, slowly assembling what he hoped would be a viable compromise structure. The Ukrainian referendum result made that treaty mathematically impossible. You cannot have a union treaty without Ukraine's signature.

[00:53:06]Ukraine had just voted for the door.

[00:53:08]Kravchuk was amanable.

[00:53:12]The third call went to Stannislav Shushkevich, the chairman of the Bellarusian Parliament, a nuclear physicist by training, a man who had come to his position more through the turbulence of the times than through any long cultivated political ambition. A man who was of the three signitories, the most clearly peripheral to the main drama. Bellarus provided geographical logic. The Bellvesia forest sits on Bellarusian territory. The Vizculi state hunting lodge was a Bellarusian government facility and Bellarus as a party to the agreement gave it a trilateral rather than bilateral character. Russia and Ukraine acting alone might have looked like the two largest republics simply dividing the inheritance between themselves. The three men agreed to meet. The meeting was not announced. Gorbachev was not informed. The Soviet Parliament was not consulted. The leaders of the other nine republics that would be affected by whatever was decided were not invited or notified.

[00:54:15]A decision about the fate of 300 million people was going to be made by three men in a forest in secret over the course of approximately 36 hours. They arrived at Visculi on the evening of December 7th.

[00:54:28]The lodge was a comfortable Soviet era facility. hunting trophies on the walls, heavy wooden furniture, a dining room where meals were served by staff who had been instructed, according to later accounts, to maintain strict confidentiality about the identity of the guests. Outside the Bellasia forest was silent under its winter snow. The bison moved somewhere in the darkness between the trees. The negotiations that followed have been reconstructed from the memoirs of all three participants, though the accounts differ in various details. as the accounts of men describing their own roles in historic events almost always do, particularly when those roles carry the weight of having ended a civilization.

[00:55:12]What is not disputed is the basic sequence. The three leaders and their small teams of advisers worked through the night of December 7th and into the morning of December 8th. Legal texts were drafted and revised. The fundamental question, what exactly were they creating? And what legal basis did they have to create it? Occupied the lawyers and the delegation for hours.

[00:55:34]The legal question was genuinely thorny.

[00:55:37]The Soviet Union had been established by a treaty in 1922. The original signitories to that founding treaty were Russia, Ukraine, Bellarus, and the Transcaucasian Federation. Three of the four original signitories were in this room.

[00:55:55]The argument developed by the legal advisers present was that the three founding republics had the authority to declare the original treaty dissolved and to establish in its place a new framework. The commonwealth of independent states, a loose association without common government, without a president, without a military command structure, without any of the attributes of the state that was being replaced.

[00:56:20]Whether this legal argument was sound is a question that constitutional scholars have debated ever since. What is not debatable is that no court, no parliament, no referendum and no established constitutional procedure validated it in real time. It was a political act dressed in legal language executed by menan who had the power to execute it because at that particular moment in history, no one had the power to stop them. The document was finalized in the early hours of December 8th.

[00:56:50]Three signatures.

[00:56:54]The agreement on the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States declared in its preamble that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality had ceased to exist. And then Boris Yelson picked up the telephone. He did not call Male Gorbachoff. He called George Herbert Walker Bush the president of the United States of America. This sequence documented in the memoirs of participants on both sides confirmed by declassified records. A matter of historical record that no serious researcher disputes is perhaps the single most revealing detail of the entire dissolution story. Not because a phone call to Washington was inherently sinister. Not because informing the American president of a major geopolitical development was in itself improper, but because of the order.

[00:57:51]Because of what the order reveals about who was considered the primary audience for this news, who was considered the principal stakeholder whose reaction mattered most, who was in the minds of the men who had just dissolved the Soviet Union, the most important person to inform. Gorbachev learned that his country had been dissolved from Shushkovich, who called him after Yeltson had already spoken to Bush. The president of the Soviet Union found out that the Soviet Union no longer existed.

[00:58:18]After the president of the United States already knew. Bush's reaction, as recorded by his aids and later described in his memoirs and those of his national security adviser, Brent Scowcraftoft, was measured and careful. There was no triumphalism in the Oval Office that morning, or at least none that made it into the written record.

[00:58:39]Bush was concerned about nuclear weapons, about stability, about the practical mechanics of what dissolution meant for the security architecture that had defined the world for 45 years.

[00:58:51]These were legitimate concerns, and Bush's caution in his public statements in the days that followed reflected a genuine appreciation of the risks involved in the collapse of a nuclear superpower.

[00:59:03]But the phone call had come to him first, and that fact sits in the historical record like a splinter.

[00:59:10]Small, seemingly minor, impossible to ignore once you notice it. Gorbachev, when he received the news, was furious.

[00:59:17]He called the Bellvesia agreement unconstitutional, illegal, a coup, using the same word with bitter irony that had been used to describe the August pooch. He was right on the constitutional point. He was right that the agreement had no legal basis in the existing Soviet constitutional framework.

[00:59:39]He was right that three republic leaders had no authority under Soviet law to dissolve the state. He was absolutely, technically, legally correct. It made no difference whatsoever because legality at this point in Soviet history had been rendered irrelevant by the same reforms and institutional demolitions that had been accumulating for 6 years. There was no court that would hear his case. There was no military that would act on his orders. There was no parliament that retained the authority or the will to reverse what had been done. The instruments of legitimate authority had been systematically removed and what remained was the bare political fact.

[01:00:17]Three men had signed a document. The United States had been informed and had not objected and the Soviet Union was over.

[01:00:28]On December 21st in Alma Ata, the city that is now Almati, the former capital of Kazakhstan, a city that had itself been part of the Soviet project since the 1920s.

[01:00:39]11 of the 15 former Soviet republics signed the Alma Ata Declaration, formally establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States and confirming the dissolution of the Union. The three Baltic states, which had already achieved international recognition of their independence, did not participate.

[01:00:57]Georgia, in the grip of civil conflict, was absent. The remaining 11 signed. The ceremony in Alma had a particular quality that participants later described in similar terms. An atmosphere of unreality of men performing the burial rights for something so large that its death could not quite be comprehended even by the people presiding over it.

[01:01:22]These were leaders of republics that had spent their entire political careers inside the Soviet system that had been formed by Soviet institutions that were now dismantling the framework within which their own identities had been constructed. Some of them in later interviews described a sensation of vertigo of looking down from a great height without being certain what was below. 4 days later on December 25th, Mikail Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television for the last time as president of a country that technically legally still existed for a few more hours. His resignation speech was quiet, almost gentle in its tone, a far cry from the fury he had expressed in private in the days since Bellasia. He spoke of the reforms he had attempted, of the necessity of change, of his hopes for the future of the peoples of the former union. When the speech ended, the red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from above the Kremlin for the last time.

[01:02:26]The Russian tririccolor was raised in its place. 300 million people went to sleep in one country and woke up in the 15. Some of those 15 countries would find stability and prosperity. Some would fall into wars that are still not fully resolved decades later. Some would experience economic collapses so severe that life expectancy dropped measurably and birth rates fell in ways that demographers still describe as catastrophic. The people who lost the most in all of this, the ordinary citizens who had voted 9 months earlier to keep their country alive were not in the hunting lodge when the decision was made. They were not consulted afterward.

[01:03:06]Their vote expressed clearly and democratically was simply set aside by men who had decided they knew better or by men who had been positioned over the course of six carefully managed years to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to do exactly what was required. The Soviet Union died in a forest.

[01:03:28]It was buried in Alma and the question of who ordered the funeral, who planned it, who funded it, who ensured that every obstacle was removed and every safeguard disabled at precisely the right moment is the question that the final chapter of this investigation must now attempt to answer. When a civilization disappears, the first instinct of those who survive it is to find a reason that makes the loss bearable. Accidents are bearable. inevitable historical forces are bearable. The idea that something so large, so complex, so deeply woven into the lives of 300 million people could simply run its course and end, that is bearable because it implies that no one is responsible, that grief has no address, that the anger has nowhere to go. What is not bearable, what the human mind resists with extraordinary stubbornness, is the possibility that it was a choice, that specific people made specific decisions for specific reasons, that the loss was not fate, but design.

[01:04:33]This investigation has followed the evidence across 6 years and six chapters. Now it is time to name what the evidence suggests and ask the question that official histories have preferred to leave permanently open.

[01:04:46]Begin with Gorbachoff because no honest accounting can avoid him. Four distinct theories of his motivation have circulated in serious analytical and historical literature since 1991 and they are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist, overlap, and reinforce each other in ways that make the final portrait more complex and more damning than any single explanation allows. The first theory is ideological. Gorbachev genuinely believed, according to this reading, that socialism could be reformed into something humane and functional, a European social democracy and Soviet clothing. He admired the Nordic model. He read Western political philosophy.

[01:05:34]He believed with what his defenders describe as tragic sincerity that he could open the system without breaking it. That Glasnost and Parisa were surgical tools rather than demolition charges. On this reading, he was not a traitor but a visionary who catastrophically misjudged the structural fragility of the system he was operating on. He opened the patient for surgery and discovered that the patient could not survive the procedure.

[01:06:02]The second theory is personal. Gorbachev was a man of extraordinary vanity. Not the crude vanity of a man who wants palaces and money, but the subtler and more dangerous vanity of a man who needs to be admired by the people he considers his intellectual equals. And by the late 1980s, the people whose admiration he most visibly craved were not in Moscow.

[01:06:27]They were in London, in Paris, in Washington, in the editorial offices of Western newspapers that ran his photograph on their covers with captions that called him the most important man in the world. Margaret Thatcher had said she could do business with him. Helmet Cole had embraced him. Reagan had walked with him in Red Square. For a man from a provincial Russian background, for a man whose entire formation had been within the Soviet system that the Western world regarded with contempt. This admiration was intoxicating and intoxicated men make decisions based on the approval they are seeking rather than the interests they are supposed to be serving. The third theory is economic.

[01:07:10]By the mid 1980s, the Soviet economy was under genuine pressure. Not terminal pressure, not the kind of pressure that made collapse inevitable, but real pressure that required real decisions.

[01:07:21]The oil price had fallen sharply. The anti-alcohol campaign had destroyed a significant revenue stream.

[01:07:31]The arms race was consuming resources that the civilian economy desperately needed. On this reading, Gorbachev made a calculated bet. Trade geopolitical concessions for Western economic integration, use the influx of Western capital and technology to modernize the Soviet economy, and emerge from the transition with a reformed but viable state. The bet failed because the West took the concessions and did not deliver the economic partnership. The credits arrived late and insufficient. The promised Marshall plan for the Soviet Union never materialized. Gorbachev was outmaneuvered by negotiating partners who had no intention of honoring the implicit bargain. The fourth theory is the one that official narratives in western capitals and in the memoirs of the principal actors work hardest to prevent from being taken seriously.

[01:08:25]It holds that Gorbachev was not simply naive, not simply vain, not simply a failed gambler, but that he was in some meaningful sense working toward an outcome that served external interests as much as or more than Soviet interests. This theory does not require him to have been a recruited agent, to have attended secret meetings, to have received payments in unmarked envelopes.

[01:08:49]It requires only that his decisions consistently and over a period of years produced outcomes that benefited specific external parties. that he was aware of this and that the rewards he received, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, the millions of dollars in lecture fees from Western institutions after the dissolution, the foundation funded by Western donors, the lifetime of celebrity in the capitals of the countries that gained most from the Soviet collapse were not coincidental byproducts of his leadership, but its compensation. The Nobel Prize is worth pausing on.

[01:09:28]Gorbachev received it in October 1990, 14 months before the dissolution while the process of dismantlement was still actively underway. The prize committee cited his role in ending the cold war.

[01:09:41]It is perhaps the only Nobel Peace Prize in history awarded to a sitting head estate while the country he led was in the process of being dissolved in a manner that would produce multiple armed conflicts within its former territory.

[01:09:55]The Nagorno Carabac War, the Transnistrian conflict, the Georgian civil war, the first Chetchin war which killed tens of thousands of people and left a republic in ruins. The second Chetchin war, the slow demographic catastrophe of the 1990s, in which male life expectancy in Russia fell to levels not seen since the Second World War, in which the population of the former Soviet space declined by millions as death rates rose and birth rates collapsed. These are the consequences of what Gorbachev was awarded for.

[01:10:30]The committee presumably did not foresee them. Or perhaps they were simply outside the frame of consideration. The Cold War was over. That was what mattered to the people who give prizes.

[01:10:40]Now look at the winners. Identify them clearly without the diplomatic euphemism that usually softens this accounting.

[01:10:47]The United States won. The disappearance of the Soviet Union resolved at a stroke every major strategic challenge that American foreign policy had faced since 1945.

[01:10:58]The containment strategy that had defined American grand strategy for four decades became unnecessary overnight.

[01:11:05]The military budget pressures that the Soviet threat had created evaporated.

[01:11:11]American financial institutions, American corporations, American advisers of every description poured into the former Soviet space and found there a vast resourcerich territory whose institutional frameworks had been demolished, whose legal protections for citizens were non-existent or uninforcable, and whose natural resources, oil, gas, metals, timber, were available for acquisition at prices that would have been unimaginable in any functioning state. The 1990s were for a specific category of American and Western European financial institution.

[01:11:51]One of the most profitable decades in history, not coincidentally, NATO won.

[01:11:57]The alliance that had been created contained Soviet power found itself after 1991 in search of a purpose and found one in expansion. The promises made to Gorbachev about NATO's eastward movement were set aside with remarkable speed. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined in 1999.

[01:12:20]The Baltic states joined in 2004. The expansion continued eastward in subsequent years in directions that Soviet and then Russian military planners had identified as existential threats to Russian security since the Cold War began. The concessions Gorbachev made without binding legal guarantees were from a western strategic perspective not concessions at all. They were simply the removal of an obstacle that no longer needed to be respected once the obstacles patron had dissolved.

[01:12:51]The Republic elites won in every former Soviet Republic. The dissolution created a class of newly sovereign rulers, men and women who had been mid-level party functionaries or regional administrators and who found themselves overnight presidents and prime ministers of independent states. With sovereignty came control of state assets, the factories, the energy infrastructure, the land, the natural resources that had previously belonged to the union.

[01:13:24]The privatization processes that followed in Russia, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in every former republic transferred these assets from collective ownership into private hands at extraordinary speed and with minimal legal oversight. The people who controlled the privatization processes became extraordinarily wealthy. The people whose savings were destroyed by the hyperinflation that accompanied the uh economic shock therapy of the early 1990s. ordinary citizens, pensioners, factory workers, teachers, doctors, received nothing. And those ordinary citizens, 300 million of them spread across 11 time zones who had voted in March 1991 to keep their country alive, they lost they lost their savings. They lost the social infrastructure, the guaranteed employment, the subsidized housing, the universal healthcare, the free education that the Soviet system had provided imperfectly but consistently.

[01:14:24]They lost the physical security of the state. In the years immediately following dissolution, violent crime in Russia increased by factors that criminologists describe as historically unprecedented for a peaceime society.

[01:14:38]They lost the demographic future that should have been theirs. The population of Russia alone declined by hundreds of thousands of people in the 1990s as deaths outpaced births and immigration accelerated. They lost the wars.

[01:14:53]Carabach, Transnistria, Abcazia, South Oadia, Chetchna twice, Tajikiststan.

[01:15:02]These are not footnotes. These are years of human lives destroyed in conflicts that the Soviet system, with all its brutality and repression, had managed to prevent from becoming open warfare. The dissolution did not bring peace to the peoples of the former Soviet Union. It brought the opposite, now the alternative, because no honest historical reckoning can avoid the counterfactual, the question of what might have been had different choices been made.

[01:15:32]China. The comparison is unavoidable and uncomfortable for those who wish to present the Soviet collapse as inevitable. In 1989, China faced pressures that were in many ways analogous to those facing the Soviet Union. Popular demands for political reform, an economy in need of restructuring, nationalist tensions in peripheral regions, and a leadership elite divided about how to respond. The Chinese Communist Party chose a path of economic opening without political liberalization. The results across the following three decades included the largest reduction in absolute poverty in human history, the construction of the world's second largest economy, and the preservation of a state that remained capable of projecting power and providing order across its territory.

[01:16:18]The Chinese path was not without cost.

[01:16:20]The suppression of the Tanaman Square protests in June 1989 was a moral catastrophe that China's leadership has never honestly reckoned with.

[01:16:33]The political repression that accompanied economic liberalization produced real and ongoing human rights failures that deserve condemnation. None of this is in question. But here's the point. The Soviet Union had in 1985 options the Chinese path was one of them. Economic reform, selective opening, controlled political liberalization that preserved institutional continuity. This was a possible future. It was not chosen. And the question of why it was not chosen, why the Soviet leadership, unlike the Chinese leadership, pursued reforms that destroyed institutional legitimacy rather than reforms that preserved it, is a question that the four theories of Gorbachoff's motivation each answer differently, and that only one of them answers completely. Stand back now and look at the full picture. six years, a coherent sequence of decisions, each of which weakened a specific pillar of Soviet institutional strength, the anti-alcohol campaign that bled the budget, the replacement of regional party networks that removed the institutional nervous system, the Glasnos campaign that delegitimized every Soviet institution simultaneously, the foreign policy concessions that signaled to every interested party that the Soviet leadership would not fight the nationalist conflicts that the security apparatus was prevented from managing the Yeltson rehabilitation that created an alternative center of power funded by precisely the interests that stood to gain most from Soviet dissolution. The coup that failed in ways that only make sense if failure was the design. The midnight meeting in a forest that bypassed every democratic and legal mechanism available. the phone call to Washington before the call to Moscow. At every step, the outcome served the same set of interests. At every step, the people who should have resisted either stepped aside, were removed, or were somehow convinced that what was happening was necessary and good.

[01:18:38]At every step, the architecture of dissolution was maintained with a consistency that ordinary incompetence cannot explain. This is not a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory requires secret meetings and hidden documents and evidence that has been suppressed. What this investigation has described is largely a matter of public record.

[01:18:59]Documents that have been declassified, memoirs that have been published, phone calls that have been acknowledged. The architecture of the Soviet dissolution is not hidden. It is simply not assembled, not presented as a coherent sequence, not examined as what it appears to be when you lay all the pieces side by side. What it appears to be when you do that is a managed process, a process with external assistance, internal collaboration, and a beneficiary list that did not include the people whose lives it most dramatically affected. Gorbachev lived until 2022.

[01:19:39]He died at 91 years old in a Moscow hospital, having spent 30 years after the dissolution traveling the world, giving lectures at Western universities for fees that would have been unimaginable to the citizens whose savings were destroyed in the inflation of his reforms aftermath, collecting awards, attending conferences, being celebrated by the institutions and governments whose interests his decisions had so consistently served. In Russia, polls consistently showed that the majority of citizens regarded the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe. Not nostalgia for Stalin, not longing for the goolag, but a genuine assessment that what was lost in December 1991 was worth more than what was gained. 300 million people asked to weigh the accounting reached a verdict.

[01:20:28]Their verdict, like their referendum, was not consulted. History is written by the victors.

[01:20:36]The victors of 1991 wrote a story about the inevitable triumph of freedom over tyranny. About the natural collapse of a system that could not sustain itself, about the democratic aspirations of peoples who simply wanted what everyone wants. It is a clean story. It has heroes and villains arranged in the right order. It ends with the right flag flying over the right buildings. It leaves out the phone call to Washington.

[01:21:03]It leaves out the 150 million votes. It leaves out the 100 billion rubles drained from the budget before the wall started falling. It leaves out the paralyzed KGB and the coup that couldn't manage to arrest its primary target. It leaves out the oligarchs who became billionaires while pensioners lost everything. It leaves out the wars. It leaves out the demographic catastrophe.

[01:21:27]It leaves out the hunting lodge in the forest where three men without asking anyone decided the answer for everyone.

[01:21:37]The question this investigation leaves you with is not whether the Soviet Union should have survived. Systems change, empires end. History does not stand still for anyone. The question is simpler and harder and more important than that. When 300 million people vote to keep something alive and it is destroyed anyway within 9 months by a sequence of decisions made in secret by a small number of people whose interests aligned with external parties who stood to gain enormously from the destruction.

[01:22:08]What do you call that? History calls it the end of the cold war. You may call it something