ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that political leaders, starting with Mikhail Gorbachev as a would-be reformer who came to power in 1985, played history-making parts in bringing about the breakup of the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how leaders in various Soviet republics, and first of all Russia, took advantage of opportunities during perestroïka to move out in new ways toward the independent statehood for their republics that came about at the close of 1991. During the Soviet era, the fifteen nominally sovereign union republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were factually ruled as provinces under the prevailing party-state political system. In the case of Russia, which remains the world's largest country with one-eighth of the earth's territory and a population of 150 million, leadership confronts the formidable challenge of forging a nondiscriminatory nation-state in place of what for centuries, including in the Soviet period, has been a Russian empire.
