FLASHBACK: How the Media Covered the Demise of the U.S.S.R
23rd December 2023
It was 32 years ago — on Christmas Day, December 25, 1991 — that the world rejoiced at the final dissolution of the Soviet Union after seven decades in which the totalitarian communist state inflicted war, poverty and despair on its own people and the rest of the world.
The end had been in sight since communist hardliners failed in their coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev four months earlier. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and throngs of ordinary citizens stood against the coup, and Gorbachev was freed after 48 hours of house arrest. Following the coup, power quickly flowed from the communist party and the central Soviet government to the U.S.S.R.’s 15 individual republics, of which Russia was by far the largest.
For a world that had for decades feared the Cold War might lead to a global thermonuclear apocalypse, this was the best possible outcome — for the long-suffering people of the now-defunct Soviet Union, as well as those in the free nations they threatened. But some in the media refused to blame the communist system for its failures, even as they treated Gorbachev, the last communist, better than his Western counterparts and his anti-communist successors.