Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"At the end of 1991, the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin; the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk; and the president of Belarus, Stanislau Shushkevich, jointly agreed that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics no longer existed." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "The difficulties of changing from planned economies with varying degrees of collectivization to free market economies would prove extremely difficult and disruptive. At the same time, long-simmering ethnic conflicts, above all in Yugoslavia but also in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, have complicated the fall of communism." [Merriman: Modern Europe, p. 1375] Daniel Yerginin in "The Prize" points out two momentous events that happened in 1991: the coalition of 35 nations that liberated Kuwait after invasion by Iraq and the collapse of the Soviet Union. [Yerginin: The Prize, p. 764]