The failure of
Gorbachev’s Perestroika hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. After decades of heavy-handed control over Eastern Bloc nations, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev eased their grip. In 1988, he announced to the
United Nations that Soviet troop levels would be reduced, and later said that the U.S.S.R. would no longer interfere in the domestic affairs of those countries.
The remarkable speed of the collapse of these satellite countries was stunning: By the end of 1989 the
Berlin Wall came down and Germany was on the path to reunification, and relatively peaceful revolutions had brought democracy to countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and
Romania.
Inspired by reforms with the Soviet Union under both perestroika and glasnost, as well as the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, nationalist independence movements began to swell within the U.S.S.R. in the late 1980s.