Soviet Union collapse was caused by Yeltsin not gorbachev
Executive summary
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not the product of a single actor but of an interaction between Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist policies that destabilized central Communist control and Boris Yeltsin’s decisive, confrontational actions that accelerated and sealed the breakup; historians and institutions attribute causation to both Gorbachev’s openings and Yeltsin’s final political maneuvers [1][2][3].
1. Gorbachev as the initiator: reform, openness, and unintended consequences
Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika intentionally loosened the Party’s monopoly, introduced competitive elections and a Soviet presidency, and thereby created the political space in which republics and pluralist movements could press for autonomy—changes that many scholars and official accounts say “contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union” by undermining centralized Communist authority [1][4][3].
2. Yeltsin’s emergence as rival and symbol of rupture
Boris Yeltsin transformed himself from Party insider to populist opponent of Gorbachev, winning the Russian presidency in June 1991 and publicly denouncing Party privileges and “half-measures,” a stance that made him the focal point for Russians seeking a decisive break from Soviet structures and elevated him politically above Gorbachev [5][6][7].
3. The August coup: where Yeltsin’s moment became decisive
When hard-line Communist officials launched the August 1991 coup, Yeltsin’s defiant public stand—most famously atop a tank—helped mobilize mass resistance, discredited the coup plotters and the Party, and shifted popular and institutional authority away from Gorbachev; contemporary accounts and later analyses treat Yeltsin as “the hero who had defeated the coup,” a turning point after which Gorbachev was politically spent [5][8][9].
4. From political prominence to institutional dismantling: Yeltsin’s acceleration of disintegration
After August, authority flowed to Yeltsin and the republic leaders; Yeltsin moved quickly to dismantle Communist Party power in Russia, to assert control over Russian enterprises, and to negotiate the December agreements with Ukraine and Belarus that created the Commonwealth of Independent States—actions credited by many sources with delivering the coup de grâce to the Soviet state [4][2][9].
5. Structural forces and the limits of personality-based explanations
At the same time, multiple analysts warn against reducing the collapse to personalities alone: decades-long structural weaknesses—economic stagnation, nationalist mobilization in the republics, and the cascade of regime changes in Eastern Europe—had primed the USSR for a rapid breakdown whether or not any single leader acted as trigger, meaning Gorbachev’s reforms can be read as both the catalyst and the symptom of deeper decay [3][1][10].
6. Verdict: shared causation with different roles and competing agendas
A balanced assessment is that Gorbachev set the stage by loosening authoritarian controls and creating legal and political openings that made disintegration possible, while Yeltsin exploited those openings—politically, institutionally and at critical moments like August and December 1991—to accelerate and complete the dissolution; scholars and policy histories frame this as a joint process in which both leaders’ choices, public legitimacy, and broader structural forces mattered, and where contemporary actors also pursued vested interests in seizing assets and power as the Union unraveled [1][2][11].