The USSR committed suicide. Gorbachev's reformist clique came to power and soon began to institute radical reforms aimed at liberalizing the political and economic system simultaneously while also engaging in superpower retreat from Cold War confrontation with NATO. Gorbachev and his people wielded the dissident press to attack resistance within the Communist Party; but the Party was not only Gorbachev's own source of power, it was the one (explicitly non-federal) centripetal institution that held the Union together. The fatal simultaneous political and economic destabilization, combined with the fatal undermining of the Party's legitimacy and monopoly pool n political power, allowed counter-revolutionaries such as Yeltsin to dissolve the Union through constitiutional means from the inside out. This was never an inevitable outcome but a highly unlikely and incredibly dangerous culmination of events, a willful suicide by a nations political elite.