Picture it: the Soviet Union, a vast, sprawling behemoth, rigid as an iron bar left out in a Siberian winter. Then, on March 15, 1990, something absolutely astonishing happened—they elected a president. A president! Yes, the land of Lenin, Stalin, and bureaucratic paperwork so dense it probably had its own gravitational pull, suddenly had a chap in office with an actual electoral mandate. And that chap? Mikhail Gorbachev.
Now, this wasn’t just any old election. No, this was the kind of election where the outcome was less “Let’s see who wins!” and more “Well, we all know it’s going to be Gorbachev, but let’s make it look democratic.” Which is to say, he was the only candidate. But still! Progress!
So why did the Soviet Union suddenly need a president? Well, Gorbachev had already been running the show as General Secretary of the Communist Party, but that title was starting to feel a little… Soviet-y. And, let’s be honest, by 1990, being General Secretary of the Communist Party was a bit like being captain of the Titanic after it had already split in two. So, they created the presidency to make things look a bit more, you know, official—like giving the Titanic’s captain a new hat and hoping for the best.
Gorbachev had big ideas. Perestroika—restructuring! Glasnost—openness! In theory, these were meant to reform and rejuvenate the Soviet system, but in practice? Well, it turns out that when you give people the freedom to speak, they often use that freedom to say things like, “We’d quite like to leave now, thank you very much.” And leave they did. The Soviet republics, previously locked in place by decades of political cement, suddenly discovered they had legs.
Meanwhile, the economy, which had been limping along like an old Lada held together with duct tape and hope, decided to completely collapse under the weight of reform. And as if that wasn’t enough chaos, a group of hardliners—old-school communists who preferred the Soviet Union the way it was (drab, humorless, and vaguely terrifying)—staged a coup in 1991 to try and roll back all this newfound freedom. It was about as successful as trying to unboil an egg. The coup failed, but so did the Soviet Union. By the end of the year, the entire country dissolved, and Gorbachev—having gone from the man who tried to save the Soviet Union to the man who presided over its funeral—resigned.
So, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the sheer absurdity of this: in March 1990, Gorbachev became the first President of the Soviet Union. By December 1991, there was no Soviet Union. That’s not just a rough first term—that’s like getting a new job, sprucing up your office, and coming back from lunch to find the entire building has been demolished.
But here’s the thing: while it may have all gone pear-shaped rather spectacularly, Gorbachev’s presidency still mattered. His reforms, though messy and riddled with unintended consequences, ultimately helped end the Cold War, freed Eastern Europe, and gave birth to modern Russia (for better or worse). And on a global scale, the Soviet collapse reshaped the entire world order.
So today, let’s raise a glass to March 15, 1990—the day a superpower tried democracy, discovered it was a bit allergic, and imploded in a rather dramatic fashion. A cautionary tale, really, about what happens when you start rearranging the furniture in a house that’s already on fire.
