Mikhail Gorbachev and following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 pursued this agenda. Gorbachev's policies of "glasnost" ("openness") and "perestroika" ("restructuring") and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War. Under this program, the role of the Communist Party in governing the state was removed from the constitution, which inadvertently led to crisis-level political instability with a surge of regional nationalist and anti-communist activism culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev later expressed regret for his failure to save the Soviet state, though he has insisted that his policies were not failures but rather were
Union of Sovereign States Union of Sovereign States The Union of Sovereign States () was the proposed name of a reorganization of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a new confederation. Proposed by the then President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, the proposal was an attempt to avert an end to the Soviet Union. The proposal was never implemented in the wake of the August Coup in 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union ultimately occurred on December 26th of that year. The overall proposal was resurrected as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), although as a regional organization, not a