1991
Soviet Union dissolved
At 7:32 p.m. Moscow time, Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation on television. The hammer-and-sickle flag came down over the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up. Fifteen new republics were born on what had been Soviet ground. Seventy-four years of communist rule in Russia ended without a shot being fired at the center.
Mount Pinatubo Erupts
The second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century blew the top off Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, ejecting ten cubic kilometers of ash and burying Clark Air Base under a gray shroud. Eight hundred people died; millions were displaced. Global temperatures dropped by half a degree for two years. The earth had coughed, and the climate flinched.
Gulf War begins
At 2:38 a.m. Baghdad time, the first coalition cruise missiles struck Iraqi targets and F-117 stealth fighters began hitting downtown buildings. Six weeks of precision bombing followed by a hundred-hour ground war drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Americans watched it on CNN. It looked, briefly, like a new kind of clean war.
Yugoslavia begins to break up
Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, shattering the post-war federation that Tito had held together. The Yugoslav People's Army sent tanks; Slovenia slipped away after ten days of brief fighting, Croatia after four bloody years that saw the siege of Vukovar and the shelling of Dubrovnik. Within a year Bosnia would plunge into war and ethnic cleansing would return to Europe.
World Wide Web opens to the public
Tim Berners-Lee posted a short message to an obscure internet newsgroup announcing the availability of the WorldWideWeb project and its software. The first website went live. There were perhaps a dozen servers on the whole planet. Within six years there would be a million. The great remaking of human communication had started very quietly.
Soviet coup attempt
Hardliners in the Communist Party placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his Crimea dacha and announced themselves as the new leadership. In Moscow Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament and defied them. Within three days the coup collapsed. The Communist Party's hold on Soviet life was broken. The USSR had four months left.
Yeltsin elected Russian president
Boris Yeltsin won the first direct presidential election in Russian history with fifty-seven percent of the vote. Two months later he stood on a tank outside the Russian White House and stared down an attempted coup against Gorbachev. By December he had presided over the dissolution of the USSR. The new Russia had its first president.