Mikhail Gorbachev

On 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president on television and handed control of the nuclear arsenal to Boris Yeltsin. The union had already been dissolved by the leaders of its republics, and he chose not to use force to hold it together, as he had also declined to do in Eastern Europe in 1989. It was not a transfer he wanted, and violence did happen at the edges, in Vilnius and elsewhere, but the end of a nuclear superpower was remarkably peaceful.