The Last Of The USSR: Banknote and Coin Album

On Christmas Day, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. One “Union” of Soviet Socialist Republics was now 15 independent nations: the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; the Eastern European countries of Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine; Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, in the Caucasus; the sprawling Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan; and Russia itself. Thus ended its run as one of the two superpowers that dominated the world stage for half a century.  During the Cold War, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact affiliates vied for global supreme-acy against the United States and its NATO allies. With both sides capable of wiping each other out—and destroying the world in the process—neither were inclined to push the button. This concept of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, prompted both governments to adopt different, more subtle means of warfare. In places like Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, Marxist/ Communist governments alig