Mikhail Gorbachev in the context of "Dissolution of the Soviet Union"

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR), previously known as the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) and the Russian Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia, was a socialist state from 1917 to 1922, and afterwards the largest and most populous constituent republic of the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1922 to 1991, until becoming a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian SFSR was composed of sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group. The capital of the Russian SFSR and the USSR as a whole was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad (Petrograd until 1924), Stalingrad (Volgograd after 1961), Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky and Kuybyshev.

On 7 November 1917 [O.S. 25 October], as a result of the October Revolution, the Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed as a sovereign state and the world's first constitutionally socialist state guided by communist ideology. The first constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922, the Russian SFSR signed a treaty officially creating the USSR. On 12 June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty. On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin, supported by the Democratic Russia pro-reform movement, was elected the first and only President of the RSFSR, a post that would later become the Presidency of the Russian Federation. The August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt in Moscow with the temporary brief internment of President Mikhail Gorbachev destabilised the Soviet Union. Following these events, Gorbachev lost all his remaining power, with Yeltsin superseding him as the pre-eminent figure in the country. On 8 December 1991, the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords declaring dissolution of the USSR and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a loose replacement confederation. On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet (the parliament of the Russian SFSR); therefore the Russian SFSR had renounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and de facto declared Russia's independence from the USSR itself and the ties with the other Soviet republics.

The European Green Belt initiative is a grassroots movement for nature conservation and sustainable development along the corridor of the former Iron Curtain. The term refers to an environmental initiative as well as the area it concerns. The initiative is carried out under the patronage of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and formerly Mikhail Gorbachev. It is the aim of the initiative to create the backbone of an ecological network that runs from the Barents to the Black and Adriatic Seas.

The European Green Belt as an area follows the route of the former Iron Curtain and connects national parks, nature parks, biosphere reserves and transboundary protected areas as well as non-protected valuable habitats along or across the (former) borders.

A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a form of government that combines the state leadership of a communist party, Marxist–Leninist political philosophy, and an official commitment to the construction of a communist society. Modern communism broadly grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe as a program to replace capitalism with a stateless, classless, and moneyless society, but its application as Marxism–Leninism began later in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

In the 20th century, several communist states were established, first in Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then in portions of Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few other regions after World War II. The institutions of these states were heavily influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and others. However, the political reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev known as Perestroika and socio-economic difficulties produced the revolutions of 1989, which brought down all the communist states of the Eastern Bloc bar the Soviet Union. The repercussions of the collapse of these states contributed to political transformations in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and several other non-European communist states. Presently, there are five states which are officially communist in the world: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

Corrective Movement (Arabic: الحركة التصحيحية, romanized: al-Ḥarakah at-Taṣḥīḥīyya), also known as the Corrective Methods, was a revolutionary political, social and economic reformist program, launched by new leader of Ba'athist Syria, Hafez al-Assad, soon after he came to power in so-called Corrective Revolution in 1970. The Corrective Movement program was also compared to Mikhail Gorbachev's future perestroika program. The main policies of the program were a move away from radicalism in changing Syrian society, a move away from the one-party system, increased recruitment of the population to the Ba'ath Party, and a limited degree of economic and political liberalization.

The Corrective Movement program was the new government's reaction to the results of the extremely radical and aggressive policies of its predecessor, Salah Jadid, and was marked by a number of political and economic relaxations and changes (especially in the first decade). Reforms eventually succeeded in eradicating some of the socialist excesses of the radical Ba'athists who preceded him and improved relations with the Sunni Arab merchant class. Program also led to the huge militarization of Syria and constitutional centralization of power in president's hands.

In the Soviet Union, a Union Republic (Russian: Сою́зная Респу́блика, romanized: Soyúznaya Respúblika) or unofficially a Republic of the USSR was a constituent federated political entity with a system of government called a Soviet republic, which was officially defined in the 1977 constitution as "a sovereign Soviet socialist state which has united with the other Soviet republics to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and whose sovereignty is limited by membership in the Union. As a result of its status as a sovereign state, the Union Republic de jure had the right to enter into relations with foreign states, conclude treaties with them and exchange diplomatic and consular representatives and participate in the activities of international organizations (including membership in international organizations). The Union Republics were perceived as national-based administrative units of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 by a treaty between the Soviet republics of Byelorussia, Russian SFSR (RSFSR), Transcaucasian Federation, and Ukraine, by which they became its constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union). For most of its history, the USSR was a one-party state led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Key functions of the USSR were highly centralized in Moscow until its final years, despite its nominal structure as a federation of republics; the light decentralization reforms during the era of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (voice-ness, as in freedom of speech) conducted by Mikhail Gorbachev as part of the Helsinki Accords are cited as one of the factors which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 as a result of the Cold War and the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Russian politician and statesman who served as President of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism.

Yeltsin was born in Butka, Ural Oblast. Growing up in Kazan and Berezniki, he worked in construction after studying at the Ural State Technical University. After joining the Communist Party, he rose through its ranks, and in 1976, he became First Secretary of the party's Sverdlovsk Oblast committee. Yeltsin was initially a supporter of the perestroika reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He later criticized the reforms as being too moderate and called for a transition to a multi-party representative democracy. In 1987, he was the first person to resign from the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which established his popularity as an anti-establishment figure and after which he earned the reputation of the leader of the anti-communist movement. In 1990, he was elected chair of the Russian Supreme Soviet and in 1991 was elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), becoming the first popularly-elected head of state in Russian history. Yeltsin allied with various non-Russian nationalist leaders and was instrumental in the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of that year. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the RSFSR became the Russian Federation, an independent state. Through that transition, Yeltsin remained in office as president. He was later re-elected in the 1996 Russian presidential election, which critics assert was rigged.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and sometimes referred to as the Bolshevik Party and Soviet Communist Party, was the founding and ruling political party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU was the sole governing party of the Soviet Union until 1990 when the Congress of People's Deputies modified Article 6 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution, which had previously granted the CPSU a monopoly over the political system. The party's main ideology was Marxism–Leninism. The party was outlawed under Russian president Boris Yeltsin's decree on 6 November 1991, citing the 1991 Soviet coup attempt as a reason.

The party started in 1898 as part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, that party split into a Menshevik (m) ("minority") and Bolshevik (b) ("majority") faction; the latter, led by Vladimir Lenin, is the direct ancestor of the CPSU and is the party that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. Its activities were suspended on Soviet territory 74 years later, on 29 August 1991, soon after a failed coup d'état by conservative CPSU leaders against the reforming Soviet president and party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

The 1991 Soviet coup attempt, also known as the August Coup, was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet president and General Secretary of the CPSU at the time. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials, including Vice President Gennady Yanayev, who together formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (Russian: ГКЧП, romanized: GKChP). They opposed Gorbachev's reform program, were angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states and fearful of the New Union Treaty, which was on the verge of being signed by the Soviet Union (USSR). The treaty was to decentralize much of the central Soviet government's power and distribute it among its fifteen republics; Boris Yeltsin's demand for more autonomy to the republics opened a window for the plotters to organize the coup.

The GKChP hardliners dispatched KGB agents who detained Gorbachev at his dacha but failed to detain the recently elected president of a newly reconstituted Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who had been both an ally and critic of Gorbachev. The GKChP was poorly organized and met with effective resistance by both Yeltsin and a civilian campaign of anti-authoritarian protesters, mainly in Moscow. The coup collapsed in two days, and Gorbachev returned to office while the plotters all lost their posts. Yeltsin subsequently became the dominant leader and Gorbachev lost much of his influence. The failed coup led to both the immediate collapse of the CPSU and the dissolution of the USSR four months later.