Let’s talk about breakups. Not the messy kind where someone sets your clothes on fire or changes the Netflix password. No, we’re talking about that breakup—December 21, 1991—the day the Soviet Union officially broke apart. An empire that spent 70 years scaring the pants off of the West went poof… and almost no one died.
Let me say that again for the people in the back: a global superpower dissolved, and no one really got hurt.
So how did we get here? Was it infidelity? A “we just grew apart” situation? Nope. It was the slow, painful realization that the Soviet Union’s central planning system was about as effective as trying to run a Starbucks with no coffee, no cups, and five managers who don’t speak to each other.
By the 1980s, the Soviet economy was tanking. Factories weren’t producing. People were standing in breadlines longer than the line for Splash Mountain, and the propaganda machine was screaming “Everything’s fine!” Meanwhile, citizens were like, “Then why am I eating boiled shoe leather for dinner?”
Enter Mikhail Gorbachev—a man who said, “What if we just loosen things up a bit?” He brought us glasnost—which means “openness”—and perestroika—which is Russian for “Let’s take this already wobbly table and try to fix it while dinner’s still on it.” Gorbachev thought a little transparency and reform would save the Soviet system. Instead, it let the people see just how broken it really was.
And you know what happens when you tell people, “You can say whatever you want now!”? They say whatever they want. Republics like Lithuania, Latvia, and Ukraine stood up and said, “Uh, actually, we’d like out of this weird group project.” Gorbachev couldn’t glue the pieces back together fast enough.
Then came August 1991—the hardline Communists, aka the “we liked it better when things were terrible” crowd, staged a coup against Gorbachev. They rolled tanks into Moscow, put Gorbachev under house arrest, and said, “We’re back, baby!” But here’s the twist: the people didn’t buy it. They took to the streets. And standing on a tank like an action hero was Boris Yeltsin—the president of Russia—who told the coup leaders to go kick rocks.
The coup failed, but Gorbachev was toast. Everyone knew the power was now with Yeltsin. Over the next few months, Soviet republics declared independence faster than you can say “good riddance,” and by December 21, 1991, the leaders of 11 former Soviet republics gathered in Alma-Ata (a city in Kazakhstan), signed the paperwork, and said, “It’s over. We’re done. Everybody grab your stuff.”
Just like that, the Soviet Union—one of the most powerful, terrifying empires in modern history—was gone. And they did it without civil war. Without mass graves. Without burning everything to the ground.
For an empire that once stockpiled nukes like they were on sale at Costco, this was an astonishingly chill breakup. Can you even imagine? It’s like if the Avengers decided they’d had enough and Iron Man just said, “Let’s amicably split and call our lawyers.”
Now, what were the immediate results? Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, tried capitalism the way college kids try shots: all at once, too fast, and with catastrophic results. The economy collapsed, oligarchs bought up everything that wasn’t nailed down, and regular people were left holding a lot of empty vodka bottles. Other republics scrambled to build functioning governments, and some—like the Baltics—actually pulled it off.
Today, the former Soviet republics are all over the map—politically, economically, and, well, geographically. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are thriving members of NATO and the EU. Ukraine is still fighting to determine its future in the face of Russian aggression. And Russia? Russia’s like that ex who still wants to remind you they were a big deal once.
So what does this mean for us? What can we, in the United States, learn from this?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: sometimes a country doesn’t work anymore. And when that happens, you’ve got two options: either you face the cracks in the system and find a way to let go peacefully… or you don’t.
The Soviet Union didn’t collapse because someone invaded. It collapsed because its own people stopped believing in it. And here in the U.S., we need to take a good, hard look at where we’re headed. Because if we keep treating democracy like a game where the only goal is to win, we’re going to lose the whole thing.
Right now, every election feels like a fight for survival. We don’t want to compromise; we want to annihilate the other side. And that’s not democracy. That’s Thanksgiving dinner at your most toxic relative’s house.
So here’s a thought: what if we admit that the United States doesn’t necessarily have to stay together? Hear me out! I’m not saying we break up tomorrow. I’m saying we need to get comfortable with the idea that if we can’t govern together, maybe we need to explore how we can live apart—peacefully, respectfully, without turning each other into villains.
The Soviet Union shows us it can be done. It doesn’t have to end in war. It doesn’t have to end in catastrophe. Sometimes, letting go of a system that doesn’t work anymore is the best thing you can do for the people in it.
The U.S. doesn’t have to fall apart. But if we keep fighting for power instead of freedom—if we keep twisting democracy into a tool for domination—it’s going to break. And when it does, let’s hope we remember December 21, 1991: the day a superpower ended, not with a bang, but with a handshake.
And you know what? That’s a pretty impressive way to go out.
