On the night of 25 December 1991, at 7:32 p.m. Moscow time, after President Mikhail Gorbachev left the Kremlin, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place, symbolically marking the end of the Soviet Union. This, and not the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier, was the event with the greatest global significance since the end of WWII. But it passed almost unnoticed. Most people in the West will remember the day the Berlin Wall came down; however, on this Christmas Day in 1991 they had other things on their minds, unaware of an unspectacular event that would affect their lives to this day and profoundly change the course of history.

The lowering of the red Soviet banner with its golden star, hammer, and sickle on that day 25 years ago symbolizes more than just the demise of a once powerful state, the Soviet Union; it was the end of the communist system of government and ideology that had only shortly before controlled almost half of the world population. With it ended one of the most radical human experiments of forming societies along alleged social laws with the hope of bringing social justice and prosperity. Similar to the hopes we had for liberal democracy, its supporters had expected that one day communism would take over the world as a unifying political system bringing global peace. Communism ultimately failed and ended a social experiment that began with good intentions, but that had ended costing tens of millions of people their lives.

The collapse of the Soviet Union – the Warsaw Pact had dissolved a few months earlier – meant that one side in the 42-year-long Cold War, the East, had finally caved in. It left the other side of the conflict, the West, as the sole victor, even if this was more by default than by outright victory. With the lowering of the Soviet flag on 25 December 1991 began a new era under a Western-dominated global peace order. This new era, it was thought, would ultimately bring freedom and the winning Western political system of liberal democracy, peace, justice, and prosperity to all humankind. Liberal democracy would become the final stage in the development of social organization and respond to the ultimate aspirations of all people around the world irrespective of their cultural and historical backgrounds.