30 years ago, on December 25, 1991, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation. The next day, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Soviet authorities underestimated the scale of the interethnic problems in the Soviet Union and the need for its renewal, the first USSR president said in an interview with the TASS news agency. He noted that the state could be preserved even after the August 1991 coup with the help of the formation of the Union of Sovereign States.
According to Gorbachev, the goal of the Soviet authorities was "to create a real federation of sovereign republics, which delegate some of the powers to the centre." He stressed that this was a viable option, which would have been supported by most of the republics, but the GKChP putsch thwarted this opportunity.
