Rozpad Sovětského svazu
The breakup of the Soviet Union_The Polac Brothers in the Ranks of the Czechoslovac Overseas Army

Summary/Abstract: This study focuses on the end of the Soviet Union. It begins in the 1980s when young reformer Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the USSR, and describes the internal and external positions of the USSR, its economic and mental state, and above all Gorbachev’s unsuccessful policies of glasnost and perestroika. It leads directly from there to 1991, when a group of Soviet offi cers and politicians attempted an amateurish coup that ended not only in their defeat but also in the de facto breakup of the Soviet empire, Gorbachev’s exit from politics, and Boris Yeltsin’s rise to the position of Russian president.

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