The Congress of People's Deputies voted to create the office of President of the USSR and elected Mikhail Gorbachev to fill it, formalizing an executive role meant to strengthen his hand as the Soviet Union splintered under nationalist pressure and economic collapse. The presidency proved a fragile perch; within twenty months the union he presided over would dissolve entirely.
By March 1990, Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika had unleashed forces he could no longer fully control. The Communist Party's monopoly on power had just been abolished weeks earlier, and republics from the Baltics to the Caucasus were agitating for independence. Seeking a stronger institutional base than his party position alone could provide, Gorbachev pushed the Congress of People's Deputies to create a presidency modeled loosely on Western systems.
The Congress obliged, and on March 14, 1990, Gorbachev was elected the first President of the Soviet Union, though notably not by popular vote but by the deputies themselves, a decision that later fueled criticism of his legitimacy. He received 1,329 votes, comfortably enough to win, though far from the landslide his aides had hoped would project strength.
The new title granted him sweeping formal powers, but events had already outpaced institutions. Lithuania had declared independence just days before; other republics soon followed suit. Gorbachev would spend his presidency lurching between reform and crackdown, and by December 1991, following a failed coup and the Soviet Union's disintegration into fifteen independent states, he resigned, closing out an office that lasted barely two years.