On June 12, 1990, the Congress of People’s Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian SFSR. Russia – then officially the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union. It soon became a separate state as the USSR ceased to exist.

In Russia, the events of those days are still remembered with a complex mix of emotions.

Dissolution rarely makes anyone happy. For Russians, the largest ethnic group in the USSR, the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union became known as the “wild ‘90s.” This decade is also often referred to as “inglorious.” It was a time when an economic crisis comparable to a local version of the Great Depression was coupled with a precipitous rise in crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, and every conceivable social problem. 

One aspect of the Soviet collapse particularly affected Russians. Millions of ethnic Russians found themselves outside the borders of the Russian Federation overnight. During the Soviet era, people had moved freely across the country for work, military service, or education, often without thinking of themselves as living abroad. After 1991, many suddenly became minorities in newly independent states. Their experiences varied greatly: in some places life changed little, while in others interethnic tensions, discrimination, or armed conflicts pushed people to leave their homes and start over elsewhere.

The former republics embarked on completely different paths. The elites, both in Russia and the other republics, were satisfied, since they could take unconditional leadership of the territories. But among ordinary people, views often diverged. A dozen hotspots flared up on the map, and in some other regions, like Crimea, the conflicts were simply postponed and erupted later. In fact, the current war in Ukraine is a war postponed to the 2020s, a war that could have begun in the 1990s; but back then, Ukraine simply didn’t have the resources for it.

One of the popular Russian internet memes shows the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, holding a telephone receiver. We see two pictures, in which his face changes from joyful to confused. The caption below the first picture reads, “Hello, descendants, are you on Mars........

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