Soviet files (USSR)

Declassified material from the Soviet military program that gathered anomalous-phenomena reports.

The Soviet Union was formally dissolved and ceased to exist as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted from several factors: chronic economic stagnation, the unsustainable financial burden of the arms race with the United States and foreign conflicts, intense ethnic nationalism and separatism within its republics, and the destabilizing effects of Gorbachev’s reforms (particularly glasnost and perestroika). Until its final years, the Soviet Union was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members — the Russian SFSR, alongside the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs —declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter.