“The USSR as a geopolitical reality and subject of international law has ceased to exist.”

In December 1991, the Presidents of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus came together in the forests of the Polish-Belarussian border to agree this statement. On Christmas Day two weeks later, the USSR, one of the world’s two super powers as well as a centuries-old Russian Empire was dissolved, with no large-scale violence, civil war or nuclear weapons.

But what led to this seismic event in geo-politics? Was the collapse inevitable after the fall of the Berlin Wall? And what were the major consequences of this tidal wave of change for the people of the former Soviet Bloc and Russian relations with the West, that we’re still grappling with today?

In this special bumper episode of the War Studies Podcast marking 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Professor Sam Greene, Director of King’s Russia Institute, talks to Dr Ruth Deyermond, Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security, and Dr Natasha Kuhrt, Lecturer in International Peace & Security, about how and why the USSR collapsed.

They explain why its death surprised many in the East and the West, the chaotic and overwhelming changes people had to deal with almost overnight, and why the West’s response to the collapse of communism sowed the seeds of rising tensions in relations between Russia and the West today.