On the evening of 25 December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television and resigned. At 7:45 that night, the red Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin. The Russian tricolor rose in its place. An empire of fifteen republics, built over seven decades, ended not with an invasion but with a flag change.

To understand how it happened, go back to 1985, when Gorbachev became the Communist Party's general secretary. He inherited a stagnant economy crushed by the arms race with the United States. His answer was glasnost, openness, and perestroika, restructuring. Both policies released forces he could not control.

Free speech allowed nationalist movements to grow from whispers into mass movements. In August 1989, roughly two million people joined hands across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in a human chain stretching about six hundred kilometres, demanding independence. The Baltic Chain made the world watch.

One by one, republics stopped obeying Moscow. Estonia declared sovereignty in November 1988. Lithuania declared full independence in March 1990. Meanwhile, ethnic violence erupted in the Caucasus between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and Soviet troops fired on crowds in Tbilisi and Baku.

In August 1991, hardliners made their move. Communist officials placed Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and seized power in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, climbed atop a tank outside parliament and rallied the city against them. After three days, the coup collapsed.

The coup's failure destroyed what remained of central authority. Republic after republic declared independence. On 1 December, ninety-one per cent of Ukrainians voted to leave the union. Without Ukraine, the second most powerful republic, no union was credible.

A week later, on 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met secretly in a forest in western Belarus and signed the Belavezha Accords. They declared the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Gorbachev called it an unconstitutional coup. It made no difference.

On 21 December, eleven of the remaining twelve republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, formally confirming the dissolution. The following day, Gorbachev accepted the inevitable. On 25 December he resigned, handing control of the nuclear codes to Yeltsin.

The Soviet flag came down. The next day, the Supreme Soviet's upper chamber ratified the Belavezha Accords and voted the union out of existence. The Soviet Union did not fall to a foreign enemy. It dissolved itself, by declaration, in a matter of weeks. Gorbachev's own words at the end said it plainly: the old system had collapsed before a new one had time to start working.