Answer:
What caused the downfall of the Soviet Union and the founding of the community of independent states were the innumerable crises of the communist system and the failed reforms of President Gorbachev.
Explanation:
At the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s, the USSR saw itself in the quandary of cutting back on wars and the development of other countries in which the communist model had established itself, such as Cuba. The war waged in Afghanistan, a country heavily influenced by the Soviet communist power structure in the 1970s, exposed the USSR to great military weakness. Forces of Islamic resistance against the Afghan "sovietization" were armed and trained by the US, but also received military aid from China (which had broken with the USSR years before), which led the Soviet army to successive defeats.
It was at this point that there was a new election in the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the new leader. Gorbachev was in charge of promoting deep reforms in the structure of the Soviet state, in order to guarantee the subsistence of the regime. However, such reforms, which were called Perestroika (reconstruction), whose method of origin would be Glasnost (ie transparency), eventually opened up for the implosion of the communist regime.
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president, thus acknowledging the failure of his reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From then on, former members of the Soviet republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which implemented the model of political representation according to its reality.
