The Shortest History of the Soviet Union: 7

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This is, however, quite normal. Since the end of the Cold War the US foundations, Western universities spent millions on the researchers who dove into the Soviet archives and found evidence after evidence of the virtues of capitalism. An intellectual Cold War on the Soviet history is waged after 1991 and the balance of forces favours heavily the imperialist camp this time.

Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a 1937 census that would have revealed the extent of loss. The concept of communism lay unproven until a member of the Russian Bolshevik revolutionary party, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, seized the opportunity to harness and coordinate the proletariat unrest in Russia against the aristocratic monarchist Russian government led by Tsar Nicholas II, a member of the ruling Romanov family. In 1917, Russia was already in turmoil and Lenin masterminded the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty causing Nicholas II first to abdicate and then assassinated. The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.

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USSR stamp: Propaganda for Perestroika. It reads “Restructuring is the reliance on the living creativity of the masses.” The collapse of the Soviet Union This is also an interesting overview of public perception of ‘western democracy’ in Russia in the 90s:

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. In light of current events in the Ukraine, the arrival of this ARC at work a couple of weeks ago, was very timely. Trying to untangle the various states within Tsarist Russia and then again during the time of the revolution and into the creation of the USSR is not easy. Loyalties were divided, not necessarily along racial or ethnic grounds either. Rural peasants did not feel that the Bolsheviks understood them or their needs and during the Civil War, the Ukrainian peasant army led by Nestor Makhno, was one such group, where they fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. U.S. President John F. Kennedy responded to Gagarin’s feat by making the bold claim that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The U.S. succeeded—on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. Mikhail Gorbachev In 1949, the U.S., Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO). The alliance between countries of the Western bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies.The story of an empire made and an empire undone by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was taken first by Georgy Malenkov, who lasted just six months and was then ousted by Nikita Khrushchev who almost immediately began the process of de-Stalinisation – the dismantling of Stalin’s reputation and rebuilding of the Soviet Union along less repressive lines. Khrushchev’s agricultural and industrial policies largely failed and he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 who stayed as general Secretary until his death in 1982. Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov who lasted two years before being replaced by Konstantin Chernenko who, one year later in 1985 and following Chernenko’s death, was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the unwitting architect of the dissolution of the USSR.

Historians’ narratives tend, by their nature, to make events seem inevitable…. But this is not my intention with this Shortest History. My view is that there are as few inevitabilities in human history as there are in the individual lives that compose it. Things could always have turned out differently but for accidental encounters and global cataclysms, deaths, divorces and pandemics...." Here is an irresistible entree to a sweeping history. From revolution and Lenin to Stalin's Great Terror, from World War II to Gorbachev's perestroika policies, this is a lively, authoritative distillation of seventy-five years of communist rule and the collapse of an empire. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev rose to power. He became Communist Party secretary in 1953 and premier in 1958. Neither Andropov nor Chernenko were in power long enough to have any impact on Russia’s economy and it fell to Mikhail Gorbachev to restart the process of bringing Russia and the USSR states in line with the growth in prosperity in Western Europe and North America. Perestroika and glasnost BROWSE OUR BLOG POSTS FEATURING COUNTRIES OF THE FORMER USSR SEE MORE MONUMENTS & ARCHITECTURE FROM THE FORMER SOVIET UNIONThe same happened in the other Soviet states (Transcaucasian republics, Ukraine, and Belarus) and, particularly, in the three Baltic states assigned to Russia after WW2. The whole USSR was seething with separatist movements and, ironically, it was a non-USSR state, East Germany, that sealed the fate of the USSR. East Germany came under communist control at the end of WW2 but was never formally admitted into the USSR, similar to other east European communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Yugoslavia. In November 1989, the world watched at East Germans tore down the hated Berlin Wall and poured into West Berlin thus starting the process of Germany’s reunification. This very emotional moment in history gave strength of purpose to all other USSR and satellite states and on the 26 December, 1991, the dissolution of the USSR was complete. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the day before saying his General Secretary office no longer existed and handed over his President of Russia position to Boris Yeltsin. When Yeltsin died in 2007, Vladimir Putin became the President and remains so to this day. The aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union