Mikhail Gorbachev major campaign to limit alcohol consumption, which Gorbachev—who believed it would improve health and work efficiency—oversaw. His wife keenly supported the measure. As a result, crime rates fell and life expectancy grew slightly between 1986 and 1987. The reform had significant costs to the Soviet economy, resulting in losses of up to $100 billion between 1985 and 1990. Gorbachev later considered the campaign to have been an error. In April 1986 the Chernobyl disaster occurred; in the immediate aftermath, officials fed Gorbachev incorrect information to downplay the incident. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, 336,000 people were evacuated
Mikhail Gorbachev other republics. Around the 50th anniversary of the signing of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in July 1989, the Soviet government formally acknowledged that the plan had included the placing of the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influence, which paved the way for their annexation into the USSR in 1940. The revelation supported the long-denied proposition that the Baltic states had been involuntarily brought into the Soviet Union, and so it boosted the Baltic aspirations to reestablish their independence. Finally, the Eastern bloc fragmented in the autumn of 1989, and Gorbachev made the decision not to use military force