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1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1991st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 991st year of the 2nd millennium, the 91st year of the 20th century, and the 2nd year of the 1990s decade.
It was the final year of the Cold War, which had begun in 1947. During the year, the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving fifteen sovereign republics and the CIS in its place. In July 1991, India abandoned its policies of dirigism, license raj and autarky and began extensive liberalisation to its economy. This increased GDP but also increased income inequality over the next two decades. [1] A UN-authorized coalition force from 34 nations fought against Iraq, which had invaded and annexed Kuwait in the previous year, 1990. The conflict would be called the Gulf War and would mark the beginning of a since-constant American military presence in the Middle East. The clash between Serbia and the other Yugoslav republics would lead into the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars, which ran through the rest of the decade.
In the context of the apartheid, the year after the liberation of political prisoner Nelson Mandela, the Parliament of South Africa repeals the Population Registration Act, 1950, overturning the racial classification of the population, a key component of apartheid. [2]
The year 1991 saw the rise of a ten-year-long boost of the US domestic economy with the Dow Jones Industrial Average remarkably closing in April at above 3,000 for the first time. [3] This situation would only be cut short by the Dot-com bubble of 2000–2002.
In August, the World Wide Web, originally conceived during the previous year, was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and publicly announced in August, also establishing the first website ever, "info.cern.ch". This step was a key factor that led to the mid-1990s public breakthrough of the internet, which would eventually accelerate the already ongoing globalization around the globe.
In terms of popular culture, during this year alternative rock saw a new height of popularity when some of the earliest music exponents of the virtually unknown grunge sound were released, including the influential Nevermind album by Seattle-based band Nirvana in September 1991. [4] It was also in 1991 that hip-hop music reached an unprecedented mainstream level of success. [5] Electronic music derivative forms were also starting to gain momentum and would define, along with the previous scenes, the sound for most of the decade.
Finlandization is the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former's foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system. The term means "to become like Finland", referring to the influence of the Soviet Union on Finland's policies during the Cold War.
Javier Felipe Ricardo Pérez de Cuéllar de la Guerra was a Peruvian diplomat and politician who served as the fifth secretary-general of the United Nations from 1982 to 1991. He later served as prime minister of Peru from 2000 to 2001.
Hussain Muhammad Ershad was a Bangladeshi military officer and politician who served as the president of Bangladesh from 1982 to 1990.
The 1991 Soviet coup attempt, also known as the August Coup, was a failed attempt by hardliners of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to forcibly seize control of the country from Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the CPSU at the time. The coup leaders consisted of top military and civilian officials, including Vice President Gennady Yanayev, who together formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP). They opposed Gorbachev's reform program, were angry at the loss of control over Eastern European states and fearful of the New Union Treaty, which was on the verge of being signed by the Soviet Union (USSR). The treaty was to decentralize much of the central Soviet government's power and distribute it among its fifteen republics; Yeltsin's demand for more autonomy to the republics opened a window for the plotters to organize the coup.
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower, originally the Gulf and Western Building, is a high-rise building at 15 Columbus Circle and 1 Central Park West on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It was originally designed by Thomas E. Stanley as an office building and completed in 1970 as the headquarters of Gulf and Western Industries. In the mid-1990s, a joint venture composed of the General Electric Pension Fund, Galbreath Company, and developer Donald Trump renovated the building into a hotel and residential tower. The renovation was designed by Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis.
The Nederlander Theatre is a Broadway theater at 208 West 41st Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1921, it was designed by William Neil Smith for theatrical operator Walter C. Jordan. It has around 1,235 seats across two levels and is operated by the Nederlander Organization. Since 1980, it has been named for American theater impresario David Tobias Nederlander, father of theatrical producer James M. Nederlander. It is the southernmost Broadway theater in the Theater District.
The Roundabout Theatre Company is a non-profit theatre company based in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, affiliated with the League of Resident Theatres.
Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1776 until 1917; they were also the predecessor to the current bilateral ties between the Russian Federation and the United States that began in 1992 after the end of the Cold War.
Gerd Ruge was a German journalist, author and filmmaker. As a journalist he was associated with public broadcasters Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), ARD and WDR. Through his career spanning over 50 years, he reported from many countries including the former Soviet Union, China, the United States, and Afghanistan. He was the first German journalist with a visa to work in Yugoslavia, and the first correspondent for national television ARD in Moscow. He was ARD correspondent in the U.S. from 1964 and 1969, where he reported after the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Ruge summarised his reports in books such as Sibirisches Tagebuch and Russland: Portrait eines Nachbarn and Unterwegs: politische Erinnerungen
Israel supported Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. Israel was one of the main suppliers of military equipment to Iran during the war. Israel also provided military instructors during the war, and in turn received Iranian intelligence that helped it carry out Operation Opera against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactor was a central component of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
Kuwait–Russia relations refer to the bilateral relationship between Kuwait and Russia.
The Chicken Kiev speech is the nickname for a speech given by the United States president George H. W. Bush in Kiev, Ukraine, on August 1, 1991, three weeks before the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine and four months before the December independence referendum in which 92.26% of Ukrainians voted to withdraw from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed 145 days after the speech, partially pushed by Ukraine. The address, in which Bush cautioned against "suicidal nationalism", was written by Condoleezza Rice—later Secretary of State under President George W. Bush—when she was in charge of Soviet and Eastern European affairs for the first President Bush. It outraged Ukrainian nationalists and American conservatives, with the conservative New York Times columnist William Safire calling it the "Chicken Kiev speech", named after a dish of stuffed chicken breast, in protest at what he saw as its "colossal misjudgment", weak tone and miscalculation.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It also brought an end to the Soviet Union's federal government and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide. The Soviet Union had experienced internal stagnation and ethnic separatism. Although highly centralized until its final years, the country was made up of 15 top-level republics that served as the homelands for different ethnicities. By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and Gorbachev continuing the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members, the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian SSRs, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to dissolve the union.
On 7 January 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme leader of Iran, sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. This letter was Khomeini's only written message to a foreign leader. Khomeini's letter was delivered by the Iranian politicians Abdollah Javadi-Amoli, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, and Marzieh Hadidchi. In the letter, Khomeini declared that communism was dissolving within the Soviet bloc, and invited Gorbachev to consider Islam as an alternative to communist ideology.
The Soviet economic blockade of Lithuania was imposed by the Soviet Union on Lithuania between 18 April and 2 July 1990.
19 East 54th Street, originally the Minnie E. Young House, is a commercial building in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It is along 54th Street's northern sidewalk between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. The building was designed by Philip Hiss and H. Hobart Weekes of the firm Hiss and Weekes. It was constructed between 1899 and 1900 as a private residence for Minnie Edith Arents Young.
Events in the year 1991 in Ukraine.