On July 16, 1989, in Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, a demonstration against the opening of a Georgian university branch in the city led to violence, which quickly escalated into a large-scale inter-ethnic clash in which 18 people died and hundreds were wounded before Soviet troops restored order. [71] This uprising marked the beginning of the conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia. However, these reforms have been slow to bear fruit. Perestroika had torpedoed the “managed economy” that had kept the Soviet state afloat, but the market economy needed time to mature. (In his farewell speech, Gorbachev summed up the problem: “The old system collapsed before the new one had time to start working. Rationing, shortages, and endless queues for scarce goods seemed to be the only results of Gorbachev`s policy. As a result, people became increasingly frustrated with his government. Some experts argue that the original Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as such ceased to exist with the adoption of the 1936 Soviet Constitution on December 5, 1936, which significantly changed the internal order and reorganized the Soviet Union from a confederation into a true federal country. Instead of the Congress of Soviets, the new constitution created a permanent parliament, the Supreme Soviet. It also united most of the authorities and, above all, reaffirmed the role of the Communist Party as the “driving force” behind the working masses of the Soviet Union.

This policy of non-interference had important consequences for the Soviet Union – but first, it caused Eastern European alliances, as Gorbachev put it, “to collapse like a dry Saltin cracker in just a few months.” The first revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, where the non-communist trade unionists of the Solidarity movement negotiated with the communist government freer elections, in which they had great success. This, in turn, sparked peaceful revolutions throughout Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell in November; In the same month, the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia overthrew the communist government of that country. (In December, however, violence reigned: a firing squad executed Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife.) Doubts remain as to whether the Belavezha Accords legally dissolved the Soviet Union, since they were signed by only three republics. .