Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev were both men of remarkable talent and drive. Yet, their inability to work together toward a common goal led to an intense rivalry that weakened, rather than strengthened the efficacy of Perestroika, and helped to hasten the final demise of the USSR.

Boris Yeltsin, though he was once overwhelmingly popular, is today remembered by most Russians as the corrupt leader responsible for Russia's degradation in the 1990's. His real legacy is actually significantly more complicated. Without Yeltsin, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed the way it did, and modern Russia would look very different.

Throughout the late 1980's and early 1990's, Glasnost awakened an irrepressible movement for independence in the Baltic States. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to formally declare independence from the USSR, precipitating a crisis.

The Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were the smallest republics of the USSR, yet the international politics concerning them are among the most far-reaching consequences of the USSR's disintegration. An understanding of their history is therefore crucial understanding the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 capped of a year of tumultuous change across Eastern Europe. Its brutal conclusion marked the end of the Communist Era in Eastern Europe.

Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution is often overshadowed by the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place only a few days earlier. However, it was a deeply fascinating chapter, and an important domino in the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism.

On November 9, 1989, a series of blunders by the East German Communist regime set in motion a chain reaction of events that led to the fall of the most infamous symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall.

In the late summer and fall of 1989, upon receiving news of the reforms there, huge numbers of East Germans made their way to Hungary hoping to escape across the border to Austria and on to West Germany. The ensuing refugee crisis initiated a series of events that forced the Communist regime in East Germany into a struggle for its very survival.

The partition of Germany was never meant to be permanent, but materialized by accident as a practical solution to the unbridgeable divide between the Soviets and their erstwhile Western allies on what to do with their defeated German enemies in the wake of the Second World War. This divide placed Germany on the front line of the Cold War for more than four decades.

After 1956, the Communist leaders of Hungary elected to rule with a softer touch than was employed elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Hungary became just the second domino to fall in the series of revolutions that spread across Eastern and Central Europe in 1989.