On August 22, 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin waves the Russian tricolor flag, calling for resistance against the coup forces.

On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union (USSR), once the world’s most powerful communist state, was officially dissolved. This came 69 years after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established on December 30, 1922.

A superpower that had dominated 20th-century world history had voluntarily exited the stage of history during peacetime. This was not merely the disappearance of a single country, but an event that shook the foundations of the entire international communist system.

The Soviet Union was once a colossal state, occupying about one-sixth of the world's land surface. Its territory spanned approximately 22.4 million square kilometers, and its population was about 290 million just before its dissolution.

The Collapse of the Suzerain State of Communism

The federation consisted of 15 republics in total, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. As one of the two pillars of the Cold War alongside the United States, it maintained world-class capabilities in both nuclear and conventional military power.

However, independent of its formidable military strength, its economy gradually lost momentum. While the planned economy—where the central government controlled all production, pricing, investment, and distribution—achieved certain results during early industrialization, it revealed structural problems such as declining productivity and slowing technological innovation as time went on.

Shortages of consumer goods became chronic, and seeing people waiting in long lines to purchase daily necessities became a daily routine in Soviet society. The burden of defense spending also placed significant strain on the national budget.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office as General Secretary of the Communist Party on March 11, 1985, launched reforms to overcome this crisis. He promoted "Perestroika" (restructuring) for economic reform and "Glasnost" (openness) to signify the disclosure of information and political liberalization.

While these reforms were an attempt to revive the stagnant system, they instead brought long-suppressed social discontent and ethnic issues to the surface all at once.

When the Eastern European communist bloc collapsed in succession in 1989, changes within the Soviet Union accelerated. Demands for independence intensified in the three Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and nationalist movements spread across the Caucasus and Central Asia. The central government’s control to maintain the federation grew increasingly weak.

The decisive turning point came in August 1991. On August 19, hardline members of the Communist Party and some figures from the military and intelligence agencies staged a coup to halt Gorbachev’s reforms. At the time, Gorbachev was effectively kept under house arrest at his vacation dacha on the Crimean Peninsula by the Black Sea. Contrary to expectations, however, the coup failed due to citizens' resistance and defections within the military.

The Foros dacha where President Gorbachev was held captive.

During this process, Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank stationed in front of the Russian parliament building in Moscow and appealed to citizens to resist the coup. This scene, broadcast live through world media, remains one of the iconic photographs marking the end of the Cold War. After the failed coup, the authority of the Communist Party collapsed decisively, and each republic rushed toward independence.

On December 8, 1991, Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed under international law and agreeing to create the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Subsequently, as most republics joined the agreement in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on December 21, the dissolution of the federation reached a point of no return.

On the evening of December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation from the presidency via a televised address. On the same day, the red Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin was lowered, and the Russian tricolor flag was raised. The following day, December 26, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR officially declared the dissolution of the federation. Thus, the communist superpower that symbolized the 20th century vanished into history.

It is difficult to explain the cause of the Soviet Union's dissolution with a single reason. It is widely argued in contemporary history and political science that various factors acted in combination, including economic stagnation, the inefficiency of a planned economy, ethnic issues, the side effects of political reform, long-term military spending burdens, and international competition. However, what is clear is that even the suzerain state that first established communism as a national system could not sustain its existing structure.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not a mere change of a country's name or a change of government. It was an event of world-historical significance that posed a fundamental question to the entire 20th-century international communist movement. And that question was directed squarely at the activist movement in South Korea as well. How did pro-North Korea oriented activists in South Korea accept this reality after the home base of communism had vanished?

Refusal to Acknowledge the Failure of Socialism

As the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, the world entered a new era. The Cold War order that had defined international politics since 1945 effectively came to an end, and the bipolar system in which the United States and the Soviet Union stood in confrontation disappeared into history.

The Soviet flag that hung over the Kremlin in Moscow is lowered (left), and the Russian tricolor flag is raised.

If the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the collapse of the Eastern European communist bloc, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the event where the central axis of the international communist system crumbled.

This shock was conveyed directly to South Korea. Domestic media covered the Soviet dissolution as a headline every day, and seminars and academic conferences analyzing the limitations of the socialist system continued at universities and research institutes.

Many political scientists and economists analyzed the inefficiency of the planned economy and the structural problems of the one-party dictatorship as the main causes. The dissolution of the Soviet Union became a catalyst for re-evaluating the socialist system as a whole, rather than just an issue of a specific country.

However, the activist movement in Korea at the time did not speak with one voice. Some used the collapse of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as an opportunity to re-examine existing socialist theories or explore new directions such as democratic socialism or social democracy.

On the other hand, some pro-North Korea forces offered interpretations that sought the causes in the policy changes or reform failures of the Soviet Communist Party leadership, or in pressure from the United States and the West, rather than viewing the collapse as a failure of socialism itself. These reactions led to various debates within the activist community at the time.

During this period, North Korea did not acknowledge the collapse of the Soviet Union as a failure of socialism. Instead, it put forward the logic that the state collapsed because the Soviet leadership abandoned revolutionary principles, maintaining the position that their own system remained legitimate. Afterward, North Korea moved in a direction of reinforcing system cohesion by further emphasizing "socialism of our own style."

What is important in historical research is not one's personal preference for a specific ideology, but how one interprets repeating historical facts. If the Soviet Union fell after East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, a researcher would first examine the commonalities among these countries.

The inefficiency of the planned economy, the restriction of political freedom, the concentration of power, media control, and economic stagnation were phenomena that appeared repeatedly in many countries. From a comparative study perspective, examining these common factors is a natural research procedure.

Conversely, if one explains each case only as an exceptional event, it is difficult to understand the common structure. If all failures are reduced only to external pressure or the personal mistakes of a specific leader, the examination of the system itself is pushed to the background.

This method of explanation may be an attempt to interpret historical facts within a single frame, but it has also been criticized for failing to adequately analyze the structural problems of the system.

1991 was also an important turning point for the South Korean activist movement. Afterward, organizational reshuffling and changes in direction followed within the student movement, and some participated in real-world politics or chose different ideological paths. Conversely, others continued to think with the North Korean system as the center while maintaining their existing worldview. Completely different conclusions were drawn from the same historical event.

Anti-communism does not mean only hostility toward a specific country. From the perspective of liberalism, it is closer to an attitude of trying to learn from history what happens when state power excessively restricts individual freedom and political power does not allow competition and criticism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the largest such historical case.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not simply an event where one country disappeared. It was a world-historical turning point that forced a re-evaluation of the entire 20th-century communist experiment. Nevertheless, for those who place ideology before reality, the temptation to find the causes of failure outside rather than inside the system remained. The Cold War ended, but the Cold War mentality did not end easily.

◆ Songsan Jeong Kwang-je

A poet and a researcher of history and philosophy. Former director of the Rhee Syngman Academy. Currently serving as a research advisor at the Korea Modern and Contemporary History Research Association and representative of the philosophy forum Lyceum. He has published four collections of poetry, co-translated "Heroes of Hook Ridge," and authored humanities books including "Joseon Which Became a Myth," "Humanities on the Tatami," and "A Liberal’s Reading of Gramsci."