1990 was yet another year in which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, officially a federal union of 15 republics, found itself in deep crisis which affected virtually every sphere of public life.
An attempt at saving the Soviet Union which was made by Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 1985, presented as the programme of ”uskoreniye” (acceleration), “perestroika” (reconstruction) and ”glasnost” (openness and transparency), ultimately only deepened the crisis and accelerated the disintegration of the Communist bloc.
On 26 December 1991, not without desperate attempts at saving the status quo by Russian communists, the Soviet Union self-dissolved.
At the beginning of 1990, however, the Soviet Union was formally a single political entity. Over the following months, all the European republics of the Soviet Union declared their independence: the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
You can read more about the course of those events here:
