Hello, I’ve had this in my mind for a while, What was seeing the USSR dissolve in real time like for an American? Especially during christmas. I’d also like to know how it looked like from a kid’s perspective.

44 comments

  1. Slightly off topic but I have vivid memories of the day the Berlin wall came down. My mom was glued to the TV with tears running down her face; it made an impression, one of my earliest clear recollections as a kid.

    The general collapse of the Soviet Union shortly thereafter seemed like something everybody had been expecting for years and I recall feeling a sense of relief and, like, “okay now we can move on.” I do also remember seeing first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin on TV a lot, and thinking they were both weirdos. Which goes to show how sophisticated I was at ~7 years old. This and the Gulf War are definitely the first big world news stories I clearly remember observing as a kid.

  4. We celebrated the fall of our greatest enemy of over 4 decades and were hopeful for the future for their people. It didn’t work out so well.

  5. I was 6 or 7 when the wall fell. I recognized there was a big change, but I was too young to grasp geopolitical stuff because it was both figuratively and literally a world away from me. We did get a Ukrainian family that came in a year or two later to our elementary school, but the transfer student was a girl and at that age I was before knowing how or why to talk to girls, so I didn’t learn much of her story.

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    I did do a city report in jr high and I got St. Petersburg. It was a lot harder than peers who got like Melbourne and Rome, ’cause it was literally Leningrad like 5 months prior and there wasn’t much in your typical jr high library on the city. That revealed a lot, but I didn’t really *learn* about it until I was in my 20s and I could research all that happened.

  6. It was extreme surprise. The CIA famously thought the soviet Union would recover from its set backs and this probably matched the average American most of which never lived in a world without a Soviet Union.

  7. Can’t say for the “general” American. My parents responded to what I saw on the news at 9 years old and said “good, but this will be interesting.”

  8. I was in grade school. It was a mix of ‘this is amazing’ and ‘that’s it, it’s over??’

  9. I remember thinking we would all be friends now. There was plenty to learn from both sides. Looking back, it was a very hopeful time.

  11. I was a kid. I was bummed that there were more countries I would have to learn for future geography classes.

  12. I was 13. I remember that it was a huge news event, but it didn’t seem surprising. I grew up seeing Gorbachev and Yeltsin on TV and hearing about perestroika and glasnost, and hearing the pope championing Solidarity in Poland, and I’d watched huge crowds breach the Berlin Wall on live TV two years earlier. All of it felt hopeful. We’d heard that things were difficult for average people in the USSR, and I think most people here hoped that things would be easier for them.

  13. Personally, I reacted first with amazement, then relief, and finally curiosity as to how we would fuck up the opportunity to turn Russia into an ally.

  15. I was 13. It was a very upbeat time. People felt very happy and optimistic.

    This reminds me of something I was talking about with my sister just the other day. Only a couple years later, I was taking 10th grade world history and our teacher gave us an assignment wherein we had to be able to label every European country and capital, as well as every major mountain range and major body of water, from memory. He gave us these blank maps of Europe and told us to go to the library and get filling in. We got there and….every map in the library was outdated. Googling wasn’t an option. We sat around going through magazines until finally someone found a recent map of National Geographic that had an accurate map of Eastern Europe.

  16. It was pretty wild, to be honest. I was a high schooler, and all throughout my childhood, the USSR was presented as the mighty enemy and existential rival to the US.

    And then between Labor Day and Christmas, it evaporated.

    There weren’t V-E or V-J type celebrations in the street, but I just remember, as a child terrified of the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, this diminishment of tension and anxiety that had just existed inside of me forever. As in, here’s one less thing to worry about.

  17. I remember raising an eyebrow and saying “huh”. Then I made a mental note to ask questions the next day from people who would be really into that. I’ve always been interested in politics but in 88 I couldn’t just go online and ask people about it.

  18. I remember it was a Christmas morning that it happened. The headline in the front of the paper declared the collapse along with a picture of some tanks on the streets of Moscow.

    I remember my mom pushing the paper across the kitchen table to my dad and matter-of-factly said, “No more Soviet Union.”

    My dad looked at it and said, “How about that?”

    My nine-year-old self was astonished because I’d believed the USSR to be a behemoth that would be around for an eternity. For it to collapse seemed like something to celebrate, but we just took it in stride.

  19. For the average person. Genuine happiness for people to, we hoped, be more free. Freedom of movement, freedom to choose their own government.

  20. I’ll quote former U.S. president Gerald Ford regarding an event in American history (the resignation of Richard Nixon and the subsequent opportunity to put the Watergate scandal in the past):

    “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

    It felt like maybe, finally, the long national nightmare of those enslaved by the Soviet Union was over. Which was far more of a nightmare than Watergate ever was. It was a hopeful time.

    On the more practical side, I remember taking perverse pleasure in the thought that all the preparations the Communist Party had made for the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of their “Great October Revolution” (planned for 1992) had been a waste of time. The country they were planning to celebrate no longer existed. As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha! Ha!”

  21. Fascination. The reality of my life up to that point had been that we were locked in an eternal struggle with the USSR.

    With Gorbachev and glasnost I felt hope, then elation as the wall came down and Eastern European countries came out of Russia’s orbit.

    I think Yeltsin was kind of an omen. He was out of control, and I felt like things were slipping into French Revolution territory. I watched in dismay as democracy failed to really take hold and corruption asserted itself.

    I wish we had acted decisively to help, somehow. I feel like an opportunity was lost to ensure a transition from USSR to a thriving economy and a spirit of democracy.

  22. It wasn’t unexpected when it happened. I had a stronger gut reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was something we could watch on TV, and the desire of the people to break through was inspiring. The Solidarity movement in Poland had been well promoted here. I was a teenager when it all was happening. I remember being a little worried about the security of the nukes over there, but overall I was happy for the people in Russia and the republics. All I’d ever heard was how hard life was for the people there, and I hoped this would help. Also, I figured we’d have less competition at future Olympic games. 🙂

  23. It seemed weird: You mean a big country can just break up and be a different country? And the adults were happy about it; it was clearly good news.

  24. I remember when the wall came down. It was one of the times in my life when I knew I was watching history live on television. I followed the collapse of the USSR quite closely, I remember seeing the coup attempt against Gorby and hearing the speculation that he might’ve orchestrated it in an attempt to regain some (or all) of the power he had lost. I remember the hopeful prospect of a peaceful future with less geopolitical tensions when Yeltsin was elected. And we know the history from that point forward.

    Side note, I was/am somewhat of a nerd and watched the news from an early age, I can remember watching when the hostages came home from Iran, I was 5 years old then. I may not be an average American in my reactions to the collapse of the USSR. For example I remember being in Freeport, Me with some friends when we were around 16 or 17 and a 5×8 or so piece of the Berlin Wall was on display on the street and being the only one in my group that thought this was a big deal that it was important that we see it.

  25. I’m definitely not the average American here. I had just graduated college with a international studies degree and Russia was the region I studied. I had also been to the USSR a year or two earlier. And knew people there. My boss had immigrated from Russia and still had family there. I had 2 employees who were from Russia as well.

    So I didn’t have a kid’s perspective. I worried about the people I knew. I worried about whether or not the collapse was real and sustainable or whether the Soviets would force their way back. It was far far less bloody than any of us expected. It was very personal for me.

  26. I remember the Berlin Wall coming down but very little about the USSR except a sense of relief. Like it was inevitable. Then again I was nearly 11 when it was all said and done so I don’t remember a lot of world events. I know my husband, who is almost 3 years older than me, and a military brat whose family lived in Germany when the wall came down, remembers a lot more. It was definitely a big thing and major relief on their side from what he has said.

  27. I wrote a little sketch about it in my sixth grade social studies class but thats really all I remember… that I wrote a sketch about it. I don’t remember having a real big opinion on it, but I was probably like… good for them.

    I have a distinct memory of seeing coverage of the Berlin wall falling in Germany on the news and thinking that was great, and I have a distinct memory of walking into my grandmothers kitchen and seeing footage of tiananmen square and being horrified and so sad, but the sketch is it for the ussr. I do remember as a kid always making fun of the birth mark on Gorbachev’s head though. There was a kid in my school who had a birthmark on his head that gave him a patch of white hair and when I got mad at him I would call him Gorbachev and he would get so mad lol.

  30. The Soviet Union was an aggressive, expansionary empire that functioned in brutal and amoral way. When it collapsed under the weight of its contradictions without firing a shot, it wasn’t something to be celebrated but rather treated with a profound sense of relief.

  32. It was very much surprise.

    I mean, we did know there was an “opening up” period with talks between Reagan and Gorby…but no one really expected what happened.

    Information was very difficult to get in those days but especially behind the Iron Curtain. There were no real western media reporters over there, and the only western info we got probably was coming from spies.

    It was a very different time. I think we knew life was not good for the average Soviet citizen but we did not know that the leadership and governments were falling apart. They hid their problems pretty well. For most of my childhood the USA was considered the 2nd strongest power on earth. Honestly I think that suited us better in many ways.

    So overall the feeling was surprise. and also Elation of a sort that maybe our world wouldn’t not be so dangerous anymore. and while the current world has a lot of challenges…it still feels superior to the world in 1982.

    Sometimes when young folks complain about how good the older generations have it I remember all the young men that died in Korea and Vietnam and other places while we foght the proxy cold wars. The economy may have been much better for the average American, but there were many many downsides to living in the years 1955-1980.

  34. I was in high school at the time and remember everyone being very hopeful about future cooperation between the US and Russia.

    Germany and Japan had been enemies that became close allies and trading partners and people saw the same potential for Russia.

  38. It was quite unbelievable. For me and those I knew at the time, it was a time where we felt peace truly had a chance and all the spending required by the Cold War could be used for the good of the people.

  39. Mostly it was “Wait, what? They’re just… gone?”.

    If you didn’t grow up in the ’80s, you wouldn’t understand the constant background fear of “the USSR could nuke us at any time, whenever they wanted” and to find out they were just *gone*, practically overnight, was mind-blowing.

  40. I was just out of high school, and when I was that age, I genuinely thought that either 1) we’d be locked in a stalemate with the USSR for at least the rest of my life or 2) we’d have a nuclear war.

    I want you to think for a moment about how it would feel to have *neither* of those things. “Overjoyed” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  41. I was too young to really understand but my grandparents were from Czechoslovakia. Specifically from somewhere in modern day Czech Republic. They were very happy when it fell. Although they were never “officially” a part of the USSR they were basically a puppet state. My grandparents did not hear from other family members for a very long time when it became a USSR satellite state. A few years after the fall they got tons of letters and eventually phone calls. They had some letters that actually had sentences, names, locations etc blacked out from mail they received from family during the USSR influenced period.

  42. Very pleasant surprise. We thought we were turning a corner in history. Not that Everything Would Be Okay afterwards (though the 90s seemed that way at the time), but that that whole dynamic was over and something new would come.

    ​

    Nope.

  43. The average age in the US is 38 (looked it up). The average American was either too young to remember or wasn’t born yet.

  44. The people around me were a mix of:

    1) Disbelief. The USSR was like this life long source of fear and panic and then what, it was just gone?

    2) Cynicism. That it would just be replaced by the Russian Mafia or some other power structure…

    3) Stark terror. Many people were nervous about the disposition of all those nukes now that “no one” was on charge…

    4) Apathy. It was the 90s, lol

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