For those of us who grew up during the Cold War with the specter of nuclear war looking over our shoulders, the fall of the old Soviet Union in the late 1980s/early 1990s was an amazing thing. This page commemorates that change on the silver anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev's call for the creation of a new government and a market economy. It took another three years -- and one big near-coup -- before the Soviet Union disbanded. But this was the big event that put the wheels in motion. File art. June 28, 2013.