The Shortest History of the Soviet Union: 7

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On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.

The story of an empire made and an empire undone by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia. Throughout all the original fifteen republics of the countries that made up the USSR, you will find many vestiges of this experiment in communism: statues of the leaders such as Lenin and Stalin (although decommunisation policies in countries such as Ukraine, for example, have caused many statues and other images of both men to be removed and destroyed); monuments extolling the patriotic glory of Mother Russia; buildings in both Stalinist and Soviet Modernism styles, many now in a state of decay; artistic works such as bas relief, mosaics and paintings glorifying the workers, family units, and military personnel; and other remnants of the era including museums, especially the Stalin Museum in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace in Georgia, that tries hard but fails to be unbiased and not venerate the tyrannical leader. 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. The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. 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 glasnostMeanwhile, 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.

During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold War A longtime Communist Party politician, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. He inherited a stagnant economy and a crumbling political system. He introduced two sets of policies he hoped would reform the political system and help the USSR become a more prosperous, productive nation. These policies were called glasnost and perestroika. USSR stamp: Propaganda for Perestroika. It reads “Restructuring is the reliance on the living creativity of the masses.” The collapse of the Soviet Union

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union is the story of an empire made an empire undone by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia. 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.

Over the next few years, Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks consolidated the Russian Revolution and set up a number of regional councils called soviets both in Russia and within the annexed Russian ‘colonies’ of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The Bolsheviks also supported their neighbours in similar revolutions and signed treaties with the Transcaucasian republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia), Ukraine, and Belarus and by 1924, Russia had created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, comprising twelve republics. During WW2, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were added bringing the total to fifteen states within the union. BROWSE OUR BLOG POSTS FEATURING COUNTRIES OF THE FORMER USSR SEE MORE MONUMENTS & ARCHITECTURE FROM THE FORMER SOVIET UNION Her explanation of how Soviet identity changed over the years of the Union's existence makes for excellent reading, though I am sure many would disagree with parts of her account. However, this is not a book to be read as political analysis nor as an evaluation of what socialism meant in the Union. In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale--the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history's most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society. The 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

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The story of an empire made and an empire undone – and what emerged from the ashes – by one of the world’s leading authorities on Soviet Russia.

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. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. Sources: 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...."Gorbachev thought that he had secured verbal assurances from German foreign minister Kohl and US secretary of state James Baker that US-led NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe in the wake of the unravelling of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, not even into a newly unified Germany. Perhaps he had, but Gorbachev should have remembered never to trust the capitalists – and, as a lawyer, he should have known that you get your assurances in writing. By October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany and became, ipso facto, a part of NATO.”