manasecret
08-27-2008, 04:36 PM
A Trip to Russia, Part 4
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f294/barneyis666/a1739.jpg
Back in the USSR
All week long, we've been on a trip to Russia, looking into the origins of the Russian Empire (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18902), meeting powerful czars (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18909), and seeing their autocratic regime come crashing down in the Russian Revolution (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18916). Today, finally, we're back in USSR.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rose and fell in less than a century. But while it lasted, it was one of history's most powerful political unions. Among its official missions: to foster worldwide communist revolution.
Bold Bolsheviks
During World War I, Russia tried to fight a modern war without a modern political and economic system. The resulting hardships helped radicalize the population and bring about the Russian Revolution of 1917. That revolution, in turn, created a power vacuum that Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks were bold enough to fill.
By 1918, Lenin's call to move "All power to the soviets!" was becoming political reality. Trouble was, the soviets--or "councils," generally of workers, soldiers, or peasants--weren't prepared to be all-powerful. Nor were the former powers-that-be in Russia ready to concede.
Civil War
In April 1918, anti-communist forces called "Whites" began to clash with the Red Army created by Leon Trotsky. The Whites enjoyed support from Britain, France, and the United States. But it wasn't enough. By the end of 1920, the Whites' allies had almost all gone home, and their overstretched armies went down to defeat one by one.
Meanwhile, communists set up new "soviet socialist republics" in Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In December 1922, the communists officially launched their new superstate: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
New Economy, Old Politics
Despite the Red Army's victory, the hardships of "war communism"--nationalizing industry, centralizing control, and suppressing dissent--threatened to undo the new Soviet state. Realizing this, Lenin implemented a temporary, partly capitalist, remedy called the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Over the next several years, peace and NEP programs improved living standards and powered a recovery to prewar levels of production in most areas.
Political developments were less auspicious. As Lenin's health failed (he died in 1924), a triumvirate including Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev outmaneuvered Leon Trotsky and assumed control of the Communist Party, which more and more dominated Soviet society. Stalin then consolidated his own power, outmaneuvered his comrades, and made himself dictator.
Domestic and Foreign Terrors
During the 1930s, Stalin pushed the USSR down a path of rapid industrialization, combined with agricultural collectivization that left peasants no better off than their ancestors had been as serfs. Perhaps 10 million died of starvation and sickness. Stalin also eliminated opposition to his rule by purging potential rivals from the political and military ranks. During the so-called "Great Terror," Stalin and his cronies executed or incarcerated millions of people.
Meanwhile, Europe was edging closer to a huge new war. At one point, Stalin tried to align with the West against Nazi Germany. But when he couldn't strike a collective security deal, he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler instead. No one in the West knew it, but the pact also promised two-thirds of Poland to the Soviet Union. The deal took effect on August 23, 1939. Eight days later, the Nazis invaded Poland, and World War II began. A few weeks later, Soviet troops invaded Poland, too.
War and (Cold War) Peace
Stalin's bargain with Hitler didn't last. In June 1941, 150 Nazi divisions blitzed across the border, beginning what Russians call the "Great Patriotic War." At first, the war didn't go well for the Soviets. By November 1941, the Nazis had reached Leningrad (the once and future St. Petersburg) and threatened Moscow. But Soviet commanders knew their Russian history. They shifted factories and key resources from the war zone to Russia's vast interior. Then they launched counterattacks in December 1941, when harsh winter weather helped choke the Nazis' long supply lines.
The Germans regained the upper hand in 1942, but lost a decisive battle for Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in 1943. Soviet forces mounted stiff resistance at Stalingrad even after the Nazis had reduced much of the city to rubble. Then they began pushing the Germans back. By spring of 1945, the Red Army had pursued the Nazis all the way back to Berlin.
Victory came at a huge price. An estimated 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians had died, more than any other nation had lost. Plus, the ensuing peace soon soured. Having chased the Nazis out of eastern Europe, the Soviets stayed long enough to set up subservient communist regimes in the region. As Winston Churchill put it, an "Iron Curtain" descended across Europe. The Cold War was on.
From Korea to Khrushchev
In 1950, the Soviet Union and communist China signed a mutual defense pact. The same year, Soviet-equipped North Korean forces invaded South Korea. The United States and the United Nations intervened on the South Korean side, and the Chinese intervened on the North Korean side. The Soviets stopped short of direct participation in the fighting, but the Cold War was quite hot until 1953, when hostilities were called off with Korea still divided.
That same year, Stalin died. Power passed to a handful of figures within the Politburo, the central governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Eventually, Nikita Khrushchev emerged as Moscow's top man, though neither he nor any other Soviet leader ever attained Stalin's power.
Many in the West remember Khrushchev as the man who tried to install nuclear weapons in Cuba--and who once told the United States "we will bury you." But as Soviet leaders go, Khrushchev was actually a moderate. In an important 1956 speech, he denounced Stalin and condemned the use of terror as a political policy tool. He also loosened cultural and social controls and tried to reform industrial and agricultural policies to increase productivity. His former comrades removed him in 1964, after his economic policies failed.
Lingering with Leonid
The man who emerged to replace Khrushchev was his protégé, Leonid Brezhnev. Short on innovative policy ideas, but long on administrative abilities, Brezhnev led the Soviet Union into a period of détente with the United States and expanding influence in the developing world. Governments with significant Soviet ties took charge in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. The Soviets also extended their influence in the Middle East, backing Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian cause. (They lost favor there in 1979, when they invaded Afghanistan to prop up a communist government.)
Closer to home, Brezhnev built up his military and formulated the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene whenever "the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number" (basically, any time a Soviet satellite state stepped out of line). Yet the Soviet Union's seeming strength belied significant economic problems. Military spending was sapping money from the rest of the economy, which was already faltering when Brezhnev died in 1982.
Going with Gorbachev
Brezhnev's successor was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who died in February 1984, just 15 months after assuming power. Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was 72 years old and sickly when he took office. He died in March 1985. After that, the Politburo turned the reins of government over to its youngest member: 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev.
Like most Soviet leaders, Gorbachev began by appointing his own people to important positions. He proposed "new thinking" in foreign policy, focusing more on shared goals and problems and less on the conflict between communism and capitalism. Relations with the West improved.
Gorbachev launched three crucial reform programs: perestroika ("restructuring"), glasnost ("openness"), and demokratizatsiya ("democratization"). He didn't intend it, but these policies helped tear the Soviet Union apart. Perestroika brought freer markets, which led to the old economy's collapse. Glasnost brought freer speech, which led to revelations of corruption and questions about the Soviet Union's reason for being. And demokratizatsiya led to the birth of political opposition.
The Beginning of the End
As Gorbachev relaxed the reins of Communist Party control, the union republics began to move away from Moscow. In 1988, Estonia declared that its laws superseded those of the Soviet Union. Lithuania and Latvia followed suit. Popular fronts sprang up from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan.
By the fall of 1989, the "Iron Curtain" was crumbling. In November, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. In December, Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared an end to the Cold War. Soviet troops were called home from central and eastern Europe, and Soviet-dominated institutions were dismantled. The Soviet Union even joined its old adversary in condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was emerging as the leader of the most important union republic of all: Russia. From the start, Soviet leaders had taken care not to distinguish too much between the USSR and Russia proper. Russia didn't even have its own Communist Party until 1990. But as other republics began to pull away, the distinction became more obvious--and Yeltsin took advantage of it.
Soviet Disunion
In May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet--in effect, president of Russia. In June, Russia declared its sovereignty over and above the Soviet Union. Most of the other soviet socialist republics made similar declarations in the following months. Hoping to save the union, Gorbachev launched talks on a new union treaty, but it was too little, too late.
On August 19, 1991, the day before Gorbachev and republic leaders planned to meet to sign a new union treaty, a self-described "state emergency committee" attempted a coup in Moscow. Large counter-coup demonstrations ensued, with Yeltsin leading the resistance. The Soviet armed forces didn't intervene, and the coup fizzled. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized its property.
By the end of the year, all of the old republics had declared their independence, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Yeltsin served as president of Russia until December 31, 1999. His handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, has since consolidated his own power.
--Steve Sampson
-----------------------------------------------
Tune in tomorrow for the Final Part in the series, a look into the relationship between Russia and Chechnya.
KnowledgeNews.net (http://knowledgenews.net/index.shtml)
If you missed it:
A Trip to Russia, Part 1 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18902)
A Trip to Russia, Part 2 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18909)
A Trip to Russia, Part 3 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18916)
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f294/barneyis666/a1739.jpg
Back in the USSR
All week long, we've been on a trip to Russia, looking into the origins of the Russian Empire (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18902), meeting powerful czars (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18909), and seeing their autocratic regime come crashing down in the Russian Revolution (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18916). Today, finally, we're back in USSR.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rose and fell in less than a century. But while it lasted, it was one of history's most powerful political unions. Among its official missions: to foster worldwide communist revolution.
Bold Bolsheviks
During World War I, Russia tried to fight a modern war without a modern political and economic system. The resulting hardships helped radicalize the population and bring about the Russian Revolution of 1917. That revolution, in turn, created a power vacuum that Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks were bold enough to fill.
By 1918, Lenin's call to move "All power to the soviets!" was becoming political reality. Trouble was, the soviets--or "councils," generally of workers, soldiers, or peasants--weren't prepared to be all-powerful. Nor were the former powers-that-be in Russia ready to concede.
Civil War
In April 1918, anti-communist forces called "Whites" began to clash with the Red Army created by Leon Trotsky. The Whites enjoyed support from Britain, France, and the United States. But it wasn't enough. By the end of 1920, the Whites' allies had almost all gone home, and their overstretched armies went down to defeat one by one.
Meanwhile, communists set up new "soviet socialist republics" in Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. In December 1922, the communists officially launched their new superstate: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
New Economy, Old Politics
Despite the Red Army's victory, the hardships of "war communism"--nationalizing industry, centralizing control, and suppressing dissent--threatened to undo the new Soviet state. Realizing this, Lenin implemented a temporary, partly capitalist, remedy called the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Over the next several years, peace and NEP programs improved living standards and powered a recovery to prewar levels of production in most areas.
Political developments were less auspicious. As Lenin's health failed (he died in 1924), a triumvirate including Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev outmaneuvered Leon Trotsky and assumed control of the Communist Party, which more and more dominated Soviet society. Stalin then consolidated his own power, outmaneuvered his comrades, and made himself dictator.
Domestic and Foreign Terrors
During the 1930s, Stalin pushed the USSR down a path of rapid industrialization, combined with agricultural collectivization that left peasants no better off than their ancestors had been as serfs. Perhaps 10 million died of starvation and sickness. Stalin also eliminated opposition to his rule by purging potential rivals from the political and military ranks. During the so-called "Great Terror," Stalin and his cronies executed or incarcerated millions of people.
Meanwhile, Europe was edging closer to a huge new war. At one point, Stalin tried to align with the West against Nazi Germany. But when he couldn't strike a collective security deal, he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler instead. No one in the West knew it, but the pact also promised two-thirds of Poland to the Soviet Union. The deal took effect on August 23, 1939. Eight days later, the Nazis invaded Poland, and World War II began. A few weeks later, Soviet troops invaded Poland, too.
War and (Cold War) Peace
Stalin's bargain with Hitler didn't last. In June 1941, 150 Nazi divisions blitzed across the border, beginning what Russians call the "Great Patriotic War." At first, the war didn't go well for the Soviets. By November 1941, the Nazis had reached Leningrad (the once and future St. Petersburg) and threatened Moscow. But Soviet commanders knew their Russian history. They shifted factories and key resources from the war zone to Russia's vast interior. Then they launched counterattacks in December 1941, when harsh winter weather helped choke the Nazis' long supply lines.
The Germans regained the upper hand in 1942, but lost a decisive battle for Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in 1943. Soviet forces mounted stiff resistance at Stalingrad even after the Nazis had reduced much of the city to rubble. Then they began pushing the Germans back. By spring of 1945, the Red Army had pursued the Nazis all the way back to Berlin.
Victory came at a huge price. An estimated 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians had died, more than any other nation had lost. Plus, the ensuing peace soon soured. Having chased the Nazis out of eastern Europe, the Soviets stayed long enough to set up subservient communist regimes in the region. As Winston Churchill put it, an "Iron Curtain" descended across Europe. The Cold War was on.
From Korea to Khrushchev
In 1950, the Soviet Union and communist China signed a mutual defense pact. The same year, Soviet-equipped North Korean forces invaded South Korea. The United States and the United Nations intervened on the South Korean side, and the Chinese intervened on the North Korean side. The Soviets stopped short of direct participation in the fighting, but the Cold War was quite hot until 1953, when hostilities were called off with Korea still divided.
That same year, Stalin died. Power passed to a handful of figures within the Politburo, the central governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Eventually, Nikita Khrushchev emerged as Moscow's top man, though neither he nor any other Soviet leader ever attained Stalin's power.
Many in the West remember Khrushchev as the man who tried to install nuclear weapons in Cuba--and who once told the United States "we will bury you." But as Soviet leaders go, Khrushchev was actually a moderate. In an important 1956 speech, he denounced Stalin and condemned the use of terror as a political policy tool. He also loosened cultural and social controls and tried to reform industrial and agricultural policies to increase productivity. His former comrades removed him in 1964, after his economic policies failed.
Lingering with Leonid
The man who emerged to replace Khrushchev was his protégé, Leonid Brezhnev. Short on innovative policy ideas, but long on administrative abilities, Brezhnev led the Soviet Union into a period of détente with the United States and expanding influence in the developing world. Governments with significant Soviet ties took charge in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. The Soviets also extended their influence in the Middle East, backing Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian cause. (They lost favor there in 1979, when they invaded Afghanistan to prop up a communist government.)
Closer to home, Brezhnev built up his military and formulated the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene whenever "the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number" (basically, any time a Soviet satellite state stepped out of line). Yet the Soviet Union's seeming strength belied significant economic problems. Military spending was sapping money from the rest of the economy, which was already faltering when Brezhnev died in 1982.
Going with Gorbachev
Brezhnev's successor was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who died in February 1984, just 15 months after assuming power. Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was 72 years old and sickly when he took office. He died in March 1985. After that, the Politburo turned the reins of government over to its youngest member: 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev.
Like most Soviet leaders, Gorbachev began by appointing his own people to important positions. He proposed "new thinking" in foreign policy, focusing more on shared goals and problems and less on the conflict between communism and capitalism. Relations with the West improved.
Gorbachev launched three crucial reform programs: perestroika ("restructuring"), glasnost ("openness"), and demokratizatsiya ("democratization"). He didn't intend it, but these policies helped tear the Soviet Union apart. Perestroika brought freer markets, which led to the old economy's collapse. Glasnost brought freer speech, which led to revelations of corruption and questions about the Soviet Union's reason for being. And demokratizatsiya led to the birth of political opposition.
The Beginning of the End
As Gorbachev relaxed the reins of Communist Party control, the union republics began to move away from Moscow. In 1988, Estonia declared that its laws superseded those of the Soviet Union. Lithuania and Latvia followed suit. Popular fronts sprang up from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan.
By the fall of 1989, the "Iron Curtain" was crumbling. In November, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. In December, Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared an end to the Cold War. Soviet troops were called home from central and eastern Europe, and Soviet-dominated institutions were dismantled. The Soviet Union even joined its old adversary in condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was emerging as the leader of the most important union republic of all: Russia. From the start, Soviet leaders had taken care not to distinguish too much between the USSR and Russia proper. Russia didn't even have its own Communist Party until 1990. But as other republics began to pull away, the distinction became more obvious--and Yeltsin took advantage of it.
Soviet Disunion
In May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet--in effect, president of Russia. In June, Russia declared its sovereignty over and above the Soviet Union. Most of the other soviet socialist republics made similar declarations in the following months. Hoping to save the union, Gorbachev launched talks on a new union treaty, but it was too little, too late.
On August 19, 1991, the day before Gorbachev and republic leaders planned to meet to sign a new union treaty, a self-described "state emergency committee" attempted a coup in Moscow. Large counter-coup demonstrations ensued, with Yeltsin leading the resistance. The Soviet armed forces didn't intervene, and the coup fizzled. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia and seized its property.
By the end of the year, all of the old republics had declared their independence, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Yeltsin served as president of Russia until December 31, 1999. His handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, has since consolidated his own power.
--Steve Sampson
-----------------------------------------------
Tune in tomorrow for the Final Part in the series, a look into the relationship between Russia and Chechnya.
KnowledgeNews.net (http://knowledgenews.net/index.shtml)
If you missed it:
A Trip to Russia, Part 1 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18902)
A Trip to Russia, Part 2 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18909)
A Trip to Russia, Part 3 (http://www.gametavern.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18916)