ELI5- How did the Soviet Union collapse?
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People seem to have covered the systemic problems but not really how the collapse itself went down.
Gorbachev, recognizing the problems in the union, set about to reform the union. Gorbachev did sweeping reforms to the political and economic systems, some successful some not but the rot was generally deep and hard to deal with. The cornerstone of his reforms however would be to rewrite the Soviet charter, the Soviet “constitution.” This led to the [1991 Soviet Referendum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum), which asked voters to vote yes if they want Gorbachev to rewrite the charter “to guarantee more autonomy and freedoms for constituent states” and no if they want to keep the old charter (this vote is commonly misunderstood by many as a referendum on support for the USSR, it is not, there was no option on the ballot for no USSR, it was new USSR or old USSR). Reform won a sweeping 70%.
So Gorbachev went along and started drafting up this “New Union Treaty.” A few months later a few Soviet “conservatives” (which, confusingly in this context, means people that want to conserve the former Soviet Union, aka hardline communists) decided Gorbachev went too far and attempted to coup him, managing to hold him under house arrest and while on vacation in Crimea and tried to seize power in Moscow.
This divided the Soviet government and divided the public, much of which came out in protest of this in Moscow. The coup was eventually foiled when the coupers could not get enough support in either of these groups and would have to either resort to bloodshed or stand down.
This however created a 3 day power vacuum while it all went down. The individual Soviet republics, who due to Gorbachev political reforms, recently allowed free-ish elections to be held and Soviet hardliners were largely put into the minority. With the political power of the central ussr in limbo, many Soviet republics had votes in their parliaments to declare independence, something they didn’t dare do prior to this. Gorbachev eventually took back the reigns of power in Moscow over the next weeks but the republics had already crossed the rubicon of declaring independence, Gorbachev perhaps could have tried to repress them militarily but decided it would be too bloody, with that he essentially allowed them to secede.
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