OF THE SOVIET UNION

OF THE SOVIET UNION March: Mikhail Gorbachev elected as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; appoints Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Communist Party in Moscow; initiates a series of reforms in the Soviet Union June: Independence movement begins in Lithuania; later spreads to Estonia and Latvia October: Soviet Union declares that the Warsaw Pact members are free to decide their own futures; Berlin Wall falls in November February: Gorbachev strips the Soviet Communist Party of its -year-long monopoly on power by calling on the Soviet parliament (Duma) to permit multi-party politics March: Lithuania becomes the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence June: Russian parliament declares its independence from the Soviet Union June: Yeltsin, no longer in the Communist Party, becomes the President of Russia August: The Communist Party hardliners stage an abortive coup against Gorbachev September: Three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania become UN members (later join NATO in March ) December: Russia, Belarus and Ukraine decide to annul the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and establish the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan join the CIS (Georgia joins later in ); Russia takes over the USSR seat in the United Nations December : Gorbachev resigns as the President of the Soviet Union; the end of the Soviet Union