The USSR officially ceased to exist in December 1991.
That said, to average Dopers - who weren’t privy to government intelligence info and could only go by what you saw the news - was it obvious or probable to you that the USSR would cease to exist soon, say as of January 1991?
Did you still consider the Cold War to be going on as of January 1991, also? Or did you consider it over?
When the USSR rapidly disintegrated between August and December of 1991, did you see it coming? Were you shocked?
There were revolts in many of the Eastern Bloc countries in 1989, as well as the Tianamen Square riots; and the opening of the East German borders and fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the collapse of communism better than any change in government.
The only real surprise about the fall of the USSR in 1991 was that it wasn’t accompanied with the detonation of nuclear weapons.
The big surprise was in April and May 1989, when Hungary opened the border with Austria, and the USSR didn’t crush them.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November was still a bit of a surprise. After that, the rest seemed almost inevitable, although there was always a nagging worry that Moscow might stop it.
I think it was inevitable sooner or later. All empires fall in the end. Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, and Poland Solidarity 1981 pointed the way.
Yup, by the end of '89, between what happened in Hungary and East Germany, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia that same year, it seemed pretty inevitable that a major change was going to occur to the USSR, as well.
It was over. I first heard about the fall of the Berlin wall in the campus newspaper wandering out of ROTC physical fitness training in the morning.
By the spring of 1990 the Army was offering to let those of us who weren’t scholarship cadets out of our military obligation. They had over 7,000 programmed new second lieutenants to be commissioned in my year group. With the fall of the wall they wanted about 4,000. By that summer they were also announcing the closure of a significant number of ROTC programs.
Somewhere in there, the Army also started the drawdown of force structure and active duty personnel. We paused the drawdown process to fight the First Gulf War that wrapped up in March of 1991. Some units involved in the war literally went from combat back to their home stations to begin deactivation.
The Army certainly acted like the Cold War was over.
I wasn’t surprised that it collapsed eventually. I was surprised that it collapsed right then, and more surprised that it did so with so little violence.
It was very much my impression at the time that the US government was entirely unprepared. There may certainly have been people within the State Department and so on who weren’t surprised; but the administration as a whole didn’t seem to me to have any plan ready. Which may, or may not, be one reason why we’ve now got Putin.
Once the Berlin Wall came down, yes, the cold war was over. Or at least we thought it was, at the time.
In 1989, I had a large whiteboard by my desk at work. I used it draw various messages regarding holidays or current events. I remember drawing a French flag for Bastille Day, for example (it just occurred to me that I was basically creating Google Doodles before Google existed).
Toward the end of 1989 I drew a row of dominoes, with the first three knocked down and labeled Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They were followed by more dominoes that were still standing, each labeled with the name of an Eastern Bloc country, in rough order of how likely I thought they were to fall. The very last domino was labeled U.S.S.R. At that point, I wasn’t sure if any of the others would fall, and I was certain that I wouldn’t see the fall of the U.S.S.R. any time soon. Over the months that followed, I toppled more and more of the dominoes. Even though more and more countries fell, I still remained cautious and skeptical. I remember being genuinely surprised when the U.S.S.R. began to fall. At one point there was a coup, and then a reversal, and I wasn’t at all sure what would happen. It did not seem inevitable that the Cold War would end, especially when I had been living with it for my entire life.
There was this fellow named Mikhail Gorvachev. He made a lot of PR noise about opening the Soviet Union up. Glasnost. Perestroika. It was still going to be a communist country but no longer a dictatorship, or so he said. A lot of us at the time thought he was making a brave stand and pulling it off decently well until the nation unravelled. Then all of a sudden it was all Boris Yeltsin instead.
I do remember thinking we were blowing an opportunity to become more involved in a non-hostile role.
For me, the “it’s over” moment was when Ukraine declared independence in the summer of 1991, for two reasons.
First, the Baltics declaring independence in 1990 wasn’t a surprise. They’d been forcibly annexed and had always maintained they were independent, but occupied. And they hadn’t really established their independence in 1990.
Ukraine was different. It had been part of the Russian Empire long before the USSr existed, and spoke a Slavic language very close to Russian. They shared common origins in Kyev Rus’. For them to declare independence seemed a much bigger deal to me.
The second reason is that my province, Saskatchewan, has a large Ukrainian composition. Ukrainians came to Canada before and after WWI. As a result, I was much more aware of Zukraine and its politics. Right away, I knew that Ukraine independence was a huge deal, much more so than the Balts and the 'stans, which were so much more clearly colonial captives of the Russian Empire in a way that Slavic Ukraine wasn’t.
To me, once Ukraine left, the USSR was doomed. Didn’t know how it would end, in a crash landing or an explosion, but it was done.
I got up on the morning of December 9, 1980 and my mother told me to turn the newspaper over. My first thought was, “Poland got nuked”, but instead, the headline was an announcement of John Lennon’s murder the previous evening. 
(ETA: I was a senior in high school, never a big Beatles fan but yeah, it was horrible news.)
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was something I never really anticipated until it actually happened.
I’d say that it was apparent that things were changing, and that the Soviet hegemony was done with, but the outright collapse of the USSR was not something I saw coming.
I was much more shocked by Hungary and then East Germany. I never thought that I would see that.
I had moved to Japan in the summer of 1990 so I had less information that I would have had in the US. It was a little surprising, but after the previous events then not really shocking.
The tipoff, to me, came when Poland’s government let Lech Walesa form a union. in 1989. Walesa then went on the ballot and was elected president in 1990.
TLTE – I was in Hungary and Yugoslavia in 1989, and I do not recall having any sense then that things were beginning to crack.
What surprised me was that the Soviet government let things go so far. I figured at some point they would decide that the reformist policies were a bad idea and oust Gorbachev and his supporters and try to keep the regime going.
That did happen in August but by that point the situation had gone past the point of return.
I’ll claim to have anticipated the breakup in 1986. The big data center’s library received a copy of Soviet Life magazine with a feature on high-tech wonders in a place called Chernobyl. Then the nuke went sour. I xeroxed multiple copies of the story and passed them around to teams in my group, commenting, “If the USSR can’t handle this shit, it can’t hold together much longer.” The Czech and Polish openings seemed inevitable - only a matter of when, not if.
yeah, Hungary and east Germany were the first signs … i remember a news story when the attempted coup happened that said the state department and intelligence agencies were pretty much closed for the holidays and that they missed a phone call from someone close to Gorbachev letting them know what was going on and asking for assistance for him fleeing the country
It was 3 days before anyone followed up on it
I recall more vividly the Russian army taking the Congressional White House in 1993.
I was working with the Department of State in the years leading up to the collapse and it was still a surprise to me. I was in Prague in 1989 during the huge demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, and traveled in and out of Moscow, Warsaw, East Germany, etc., but saw little (other than Prague) that indicated the end was near.