The Cold War and Russian Revolution of ’90-91 both end: President Mikhail Gorbachev, of the Soviet Union, resigns.
Postscripts:
- The following day the Council of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet, voted to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
- Over the course of the next two years, western journalists uncovered the seven-decade legacy of environmental damage that had been done by communist central planners:
- In the 1960s unchecked development of petroleum deposits in Siberia turned the rivers into “purple rainbows”;
- Underground nuclear devices were exploded to provide for rapids excavations; most these caversn collapsed, and were thus useless;
- In the waters off the Kola Peninsula (east of Finland) the nuclear waste of 14 reactors, 17 contaminated nuclear vessels and thousands of barrels of solid waste were dumped;
- Sulfuric acid rain caused by Soviet era industrial smokestacks have devastated forests in Finland, Norway and northwest Russia;
- In Moscow the presence of industrial dioxin has caused the infant death rate to be twice as high as that of the United states;
- The Moskva River, which runs through Moscow is saturated with cadmium and other carcinogens;
- The landlocked Aral Sea, once with a surface area larger than 26,000 square miles had shrunk to two shallow briny lakes with a total surface area of less than 12,000 square miles, because of diversion of the feeder rivers into irrigation projects; and what water was flowing into the lakes was contaminated with raw sewage, industrial metals and poisons;
- The 1957 Chelyabinsk nuclear weapons explosion contaminated a 185-mile-long swath of farmland and exposed 444,000 people to radiation poisoning;
- In Siberia, prematurely rusted out pipelines leak oil into lakes and streams killing aquatic wildlife;
- Lack of reforestation following timber harvesting leads to excessive soil erosion.
NOTE: Donald Livingston, a Professor of Philosophy, at Emory University, in Atlanta, georgia writes, “The Soviet Union had one of the most centralized governments in history, yet was able to peacefully dissolve itself.”
[restored 9/17/2023]
Subsequent Events:
References:
Mike Edwards, “The U.S.S.R.’s Lethal Legacy,” National Geographic, August 1994, 70-98.
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR – Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Creation_of_the_USSR
CHRONOLOGY-Communism’s fall around eastern Europe – Reuters
www.reuters.com/article/idUSL10690064
Livingston—A Moral Accounting of the Union and the Confederacy
mises.org/library/moral-accounting-union-and-confederacy
Current U.s. National Debt:
