Quick Answer: On August 18, 1991, Soviet hard-liners cut Mikhail Gorbachev’s phone lines at his vacation dacha in Crimea, placed him under house arrest, and declared themselves the new rulers of the USSR. Three days later the coup had collapsed, the Communist Party was banned, and the Soviet Union had roughly four months left to…
It was July 31, 1991, and the world was holding its breath. In the gilded halls of the Kremlin, two men sat down at a long table and did something nobody had thought possible a decade earlier: they agreed to actually get rid of the nukes. Not all of them. Not even most of them….
At 6:43 p.m. on May 28, 1987, an 18-year-old West German kid named Mathias Rust set the wheels of a rented Cessna 172 down on a bridge fifty feet from St. Basil’s Cathedral. He had just flown 750 miles through the most heavily defended airspace on the planet. Soviet radar had tracked him. A MiG-23…
On May 15, 1988, Soviet tanks began rolling out of Afghanistan. After 9 years and 15,000 lives lost, Gorbachev called it a bleeding wound and pulled the plug. Here are 7 wild facts from the day Russia’s Vietnam finally ended.
On March 11, 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence, starting the domino effect that would topple the entire communist empire within 18 months. This is the story of the small Baltic nation that dared to be first and changed the world.
