Gorbachev's other reforms which allowed the public access to incriminating evidence of what communists had done only made people angrier. They formed non-communist parties and the communists were voted out of power. Across Europe, former puppet regimes crumbled down and were replaced with burgeoning democracies. The governments of East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Albania were all torn down. Gorbachev, of course, did not want this to happen, but stopping it would have cost billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.
The conservative party leaders made a last stand in August, 1991. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest and started a coup that lasted three days. The military, however, feared the resistance of the people and hesitated to act. Gorbachev was back in power in no time. Following the coup, conservatives were thrown out of office and all remnants of the communist government were destroyed. Leningrad reverted back to Saint Petersburg. Boris Yeltsin created the Commonwealth of independent states containing eleven former Soviet republics. Only Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Lithuania remained outside.
In China and Cuba, authoritarian rule survived only by making major successions to the capitalism and democracy. Collective farming no longer existed. The future of communism in the late 1990's looked bleak for Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In Afghanistan, it had already been replaced by a hard line Muslim regime, the Taliban.
The evil empire had failed thanks to the misapplication of Marx's theories and the greed that inherently accompanies absolute power.
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