00:00If you happened to be working for the CIA in the late 1980s, and you happened to be
00:06assigned to the USSR, well, you would have had a very exciting job.
00:12It would have been quite obvious to you that the Soviet Union was heading somewhere.
00:17You couldn't tell where exactly, even though that's what Uncle Sam was paying you for.
00:22But you knew that changes were coming.
00:25Big changes.
00:26Now, while the 60s and 70s had been relatively stable, and the Soviet economy had been growing
00:33at a suspiciously consistent pace, in reality, the people of the Soviet Union had plenty of
00:39money and nothing to spend it on.
00:41The running gag was that workers pretended to work, and the party pretended to pay them.
00:48Most of the USSR's production went into supporting the glorious Red Army, leaving the average
00:54consumer waiting sometimes years for goods like automobiles and refrigerators.
00:59Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary for most of this period, had ruled on borrowed time.
01:05And when he passed away in 1982, his successors were in for a rude reality check.
01:11Or they would have been if they had survived more than a year.
01:14Unfortunately, they both died of health complications just a year after assuming office.
01:21So, the first half of the 1980s saw the USSR without effective leadership.
01:26In fact, Ronald Reagan famously complained that he couldn't make any progress with the
01:31Russians because they kept dying on him.
01:33The Soviets did eventually elect a leader who wasn't terminally ill, our good friend Mikhail
01:41Gorbachev, who found himself in a very problematic position.
01:45On one side, he had to deal with a younger, more progressive generation of communists that
01:51wanted to save the Union by radically reforming it.
01:54On the other side, he had to contend with the old Soviet hardliners, who dreamed of returning
02:00to the glory days of violent suppression.
02:03Because nothing solves internal problems quite like imprisoning and torturing your opposition.
02:10Ah, those were the days on the Siberian Railway.
02:15Right off the bat, these two factions threatened to tear Gorbachev apart.
02:21When the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986, the hardliners tried to cover it up,
02:26only to fail miserably and embarrass the Soviet Union.
02:31Gorbachev backtracked and promised political transparency and freedom of speech in a bid to
02:37win back the people's trust.
02:39He also tried to fix the horrendously broken planned economy by, for example, removing the
02:45artificially low price of vodka to stop everyone from being drunk all the time.
02:49He's more expensive.
02:52The problem with that is that you end up with a bunch of hungry, disillusioned Russians,
02:57who are now also sober enough to organize nationwide strikes, which they do.
03:02The hardliners beg Gorbachev to send in the tanks, but he doesn't.
03:07The folks over in Eastern Europe see this and think, well, if the repression really is over,
03:13this is our ticket out of the Iron Curtain.
03:15And before you know it, you have free elections in Poland, a united Germany, and Gorbachev shaking
03:22George Bush's hand and declaring that the Cold War is over.
03:26At this point, both the hardliners and the reformers are calling for Gorbachev's head.
03:31The hardliners think he's dismantling the Union, whereas the reformers demand full-blown democracy.
03:38Gorbachev's next move was to organize the first and only Soviet presidential election.
03:43With him being the only running candidate, which was received about as well as you'd expect.
03:50Thus, in early 1990, it was pretty clear to everyone that Gorbachev's days were numbered.
03:57And that's exactly what the CIA predicted.
04:00It laid out three possible scenarios to President Bush.
04:03Scenario one was the complete and violent dissolution of the Union, where the constituent republics
04:09would have to fight for their independence against the Red Army.
04:13Scenario two predicted a pre-emptive totalitarian crackdown on the growing democratic movements,
04:19essentially turning back the clock and restoring the good old USSR.
04:24The final, third scenario was a partial fragmentation, where the most problematic republics would be
04:31cast out.
04:32These were the Baltics, the Caucasians and Moldova, while the rest of the Soviet Union stayed put
04:39and muddled through somehow, albeit with more expensive vodka.
04:44So what ended up happening?
04:46Well, although the CIA was mostly wrong in its predictions, elements from all three scenarios
04:52did play out.
04:53After Gorbachev's farcical presidential election, many constituent republics organized similar elections
05:00of their own, most notably Russia itself, which elected renowned drunkard Boris Yeltsin as
05:07its president.
05:08Well done, Boris.
05:09By the end of 1990, the constituent republics were well on their way to independence.
05:15They had claimed ownership of their natural resources and had rejected Soviet laws as inferior
05:20to their own.
05:21Nevertheless, not a single bullet had been fired.
05:25And there definitely wasn't a Russian Civil War Part 2 with nukes, as the CIA had feared.
05:32By early 1991, Gorbachev had pivoted towards a federalist system that would give significant
05:38autonomy to the constituent republics.
05:41He held a referendum on it that actually got approved by 80% of all voters.
05:46And for a brief moment, it seemed as if the USSR could really survive by rebranding itself.
05:52But then, one day before the Federation Treaty was scheduled to be signed in Moscow, the hard-liners
05:59decided to take matters into their own hands.
06:02They placed Gorbachev in house arrest, banned all newspapers, and marched into Moscow with
06:08tanks and special forces.
06:10The coup predicted by the CIA had indeed come to pass.
06:14But crucially, the conspirators failed to capture Yeltsin, and before they knew it, he was on
06:20the streets, rallying the people of Moscow.
06:22The coup fell apart just three days later, when the soldiers refused to open fire on their
06:28fellow citizens.
06:29But by that point, any remaining trust in the central government had vanished.
06:35Ukraine declared independence on the 24th of August.
06:38And within three weeks, the Baltics had already joined the United Nations.
06:43The USSR formally voted itself out of existence on the 26th of December, though by that point
06:50its demise was a foregone conclusion.
06:53What's fascinating about the whole thing is how the transition of power ended up being peaceful,
06:58despite the CIA's understandable predictions of impending anarchy and death.
07:03Well, my fellow intelligence servicemen and women, thank you for your attention.
07:09I hope this briefing has been of use to you.
07:12In case it has, you may consider sharing it with your colleagues, and maybe even supporting
07:16my endeavors on Patreon.
07:18That would help our tiny little agency quite a lot.
07:21However, you'll be pleased to know this message will not self-destruct.
07:26At least, not that I'm aware of.
07:28In any case, tune in in two weeks from now for another dangerously detailed episode.
07:33of SideQuest.
07:35SideQuest
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