| Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union |
| © 2005 David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College |
The story begins with the Russian Revolution in April 1917, during the First World War, when Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in a violent coup. Alexander Kerensky emerged as the head of the new Socialist Republic of Russia in July and the country tumbled into a civil war. The Bolsheviks ("majority") fought the Mensheviks ("minority") for control of Russia; and finally the Bolsheviks, led by Vladmir Lenin, were victorious in October 1919. The "Red" Bolsheviks implemented socialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology, theoretically concentrating power in the hands of the working class in order to create a "communist" system where wealth is shared equally based on labor rather than inheritance [see note 1 below].
Vladmir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known to the world as Lenin, was born in 1870 in the town of Simbirsk, Russia. Brilliant, charming and relentless, Lenin was a patriotic Russian and dedicated revolutionary for most of his life. In 1887, when Lenin was 17, his brother was arrested and executed for participating in a plot to assassinate Tsar Aleksandr III with a bomb. Lenin was drawn to the writings of Marx and revolutionary socialism, resulting in his arrest in 1895 and imprisonment for one year in St. Petersburg, followed by three years in Siberia. During his exile Lenin married fellow Marxist Nadya Krupskaya and worked diligently as a revolutionary writer and organizer. (In 1901, while serving on the editorial board of Iska ["The Spark"], he adopted the alias "Lenin" from the Lena River in Siberia). Following his exile, Lenin lived in Finland, Switzerland, Germany and England. While in London he began his association with Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, who also had been exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activities. Trotsky became Lenin's right hand man in the Bolshevik coup and as head of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1917-1920). In 1922 Lenin appointed Josef Stalin to the new position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. That same year, Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes, his health began to fade, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1924.
The Stalin Era
Josef Stalin was the son of Georgian peasants, born Iosif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvily in 1879. He became a Marxist around 1896 and adopted the
name “Stalin” (meaning man of steel) in 1913. In 1924, following
Lenin's death, Stalin seized
power in a political coup [see
note 2]. He introduced
five-year economic plans and collective farming, rapidly transforming the
Soviet Union from a peasant society to a major world industrial power by the
end of the 1930s. However, Soviet agriculture, which had been
exploited to finance the industrialization drive, continued to show poor
returns throughout the decade. Collectivization had met widespread
resistance, resulting in a bitter struggle of many peasants against the
authorities. Stalin argued that internal dissent and strife threatened
the economic development and security of the Soviet Union. The
diminutive dictator (he was only 5' 4") ruthlessly eliminated effective
political opposition through a harsh period of repression (the Great Purge)
that reached its peak in 1937 and enabled Stalin to consolidate and solidify
his power [see note 3].
During World War II the Soviets were
allies of Great Britain and the United
States. Many Americans, including some labor leaders and young
intellectuals who were disillusioned by the harsh inequalities of capitalism
and its collapse in the Great Depression, looked to Soviet Socialism as a
panacea. Some became pawns of Soviet agents, a few would later be
persecuted in the postwar years as suspected subversives, but the brutality
of Stalinism served to kill the budding Red Movement in America. The
American Communist Party failed to attract much support. (Nonetheless,
President Harry Truman, Senator Joseph
McCarthy, and various members of
Congress embarked on a political crusade to "save" America from alleged
Soviet "fellow-travelers" lurking underground in the postwar era.) The war was very hard on the Soviet people but the aftermath created
opportunities for Soviet expansionism. (Most of the wartime death and destruction took place in the war zone between
Berlin and Stalingrad. The Soviet Union lost 35 million casualties, including 20
million soldiers and 15 million civilians; in contrast, the United
States suffered 900,000 military casualties and virtually no civilian
casualties.)
After the war, the Soviet Union was badly weakened but in control of much of Eastern Europe. The power vacuum was quickly filled by Soviet puppet governments kept in place by the Red Army and secret police. (Stalin had promised democratic elections in Poland and other Soviet-occupied countries at the Yalta Conference; therefore this was seen by Truman as a betrayal of trust and a threat to the freedom of Western Europe. Stalin insisted it was necessary for Soviet security and that socialism was good for his neighbors, for whom he was generously providing progress and stability.) The hard-won victory also laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact, in response to the U.S.-led NATO alliance (part of the American policy of "containment" conceived by the Truman Administration in 1947), and established the Soviet Union as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953 of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage. For all his accomplishments, Stalin was one of history's most brutal dictators. His purge of "disloyal" government officials, soldiers, and private citizens resulted in the deaths of millions of Soviet people. Political and military rivals ("traitors") usually faced a firing squad; millions of Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Germans and other non-Russians were exiled to prisons in the Soviet Artic region. In 1956, Stalin's successor as First Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, openly denounced Stalin's use of mass repression (of which he had taken part) and Stalin's "personality cult" [see note 3].
The Khrushchev Era
Nikita
Sergeyevich Khrushchev
was born in 1894 to a peasant family in Kalinovka, a village near
Russia's border with Ukraine. He took power in a skillfully executed
coup in 1954 [see note 4]. His leadership marked a crucial
transition for the Soviet Union. From the beginning he set
out to make the Soviet system more effective by curbing Stalin's worst
excesses. Khrushchev's advocacy of reforms contributed to a
groundswell of independence movements among Soviet satellite nations in
Eastern Europe. While promoting change, Khrushchev would not tolerate
dissent: he supported sending tanks into
Budapest in 1956 to brutally suppress a
Hungarian rebellion. Khrushchev's tenure was marked by a series of
high-stakes Cold War crises: the U-2 affair, the building of the
Berlin Wall,
and the Cuban Missile crisis. At the same time, he was the first
Soviet leader to advocate "peaceful coexistence" with the West, and to
negotiate with the United States on reducing Cold War tensions.
Khrushchev is
well-known to many Americans for his famous stand-off with
President John F. Kennedy
during the
Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Khrushchev had secretly deployed
nuclear missiles in newly Communist Cuba, within
easy striking distance of most major American population centers. His
excuse, when the deployment was exposed, was defense of Fidel Castro's
regime from American aggression (a claim given some credibility by the
botched "Bay of Pigs" invasion by the CIA the previous year).
Khrushchev's apparent motive was to pressure Kennedy to withdraw from West
Berlin. Thanks to
intelligence received from a Soviet double agent, the United States was
aware that the missiles were still only partially developed and did not pose
an immediate threat. Kennedy publicly called Khrushchev's bluff and
the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba. In fact, behind-the-scenes negotiations enabled both
the Americans and Soviets to back away from the brink of war and save face,
but the widespread public perception was that Khrushchev recklessly
endangered world peace and then "blinked first" in the showdown. Khrushchev never regained his prestige after the
incident and was quietly ousted two years later by opponents in the
Politburo. He was replaced by
Leonid Brezhnev.
The Cold War had its dark side: the constant threat of nuclear war, espionage, sabotage, assassinations, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary coups, and guerilla wars. But a peaceful and constructive side of the U.S.-Soviet competition during the Khrushchev era was the Space Race. It began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite [see note 5]. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress created NASA in 1958; and in 1961, the year that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth, President Kennedy announced the ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In the end, at a total cost of $20 billion, NASA achieved Kennedy's goal on July 20, 1969. While the space race led to the development of thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads, it also produced countless useful developments for improving the quality of life on Earth [see Space Race].
By the 1970s, Soviet-U.S. relations were described as having entered an era of détente, and the Cold War was beginning to thaw. President Richard Nixon visited Chairman Mao in China; then Nixon met with Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, and the two world powers began nuclear arms control negotiations (resulting in a series of Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, known as SALT I, SALT II...). Détente fell apart when President Jimmy Carter ordered a boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest Soviet human rights violations and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Brezhnev died in 1982 and was replaced by Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB. He tried to reform the Soviet Union but died after little more than a year in office. He was replaced by party loyalist Konstantin Chernenko, who also died after a year in office. Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985.
The Gorbachev Era
Mikhail Gorbachev
was born to a peasant family in Privolnoye, Stavropol province, in
1931. He studied law at Moscow State University and joined the Soviet
Communist Party in 1952. For the next three decades he quietly moved up the
organizational ladder as a protégé of Andropov, building a reputation as an
enemy of corruption and inefficiency.
Gorbachev inherited a country with serious economic and foreign policy
troubles. Like Khrushchev, he approved measures aimed at loosening social
restraints. The measures, which Gorbachev called glasnost (“openness”) and
perestroika (“restructuring”), were expected to invigorate the Soviet
economy by increasing the free flow of goods and information. The basic
poverty of the Soviet people, the waste of the country's resources, and the
unpopularity of the Afghan conflict were openly discussed for the first time
in Soviet history. Rapid and radical changes began. Dissidents like Andrei Sakharov were released from prison and allowed to voice their views.
Despite harsh rhetoric (referring to the
Soviet union as an "evil empire" and demanding that Gorbachev take down the
Berlin Wall), President Ronald
Reagan was open to a return to
détente. Gorbachev and Reagan met
in four summits: Geneva (1985), Reykjavik, Iceland (1986), Washington
(1987), and Moscow (1988). The
two leaders developed a
personal bond of friendship and trust that led to the INF Treaty reducing
the number of intermediate-range
nuclear weapons in Europe.
A serious national crisis rocked the Soviet Union in April 1986 when a nuclear power plant near the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl suffered a reactor explosion. Nearly forty times the radioactivity of the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was released into the atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands of people had to be evacuated. This major environmental disaster, one of the worst industrial accidents in history, had a profound impact on the Soviet Union. Millions of Ukrainians and Russians suffered the health effects of radiation, billions of rubles were spent on relocation and decontamination, and a vast area of rich farmland was rendered useless. The Chernobyl disaster exposed the Soviet political culture of secrecy, deception, and denial, a disregard for workers' safety and welfare, and the inability to manage a crisis. It also fueled the movement for Ukrainian independence.
Another serious problem for Gorbachev was the worsening situation in Afghanistan. A seemingly endless series of one bloody coup after another, from 1973 to 1979, had drawn the Soviet Union into what many observers characterized as a "Soviet Vietnam" (in reference to the U.S. foreign policy debacle). Facing a deteriorating security situation, Brezhnev ordered a surprise military intervention of the newly established Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in December 1979. KGB special forces, dressed in Afghan uniforms, stormed the presidential palace in Kabul and killed Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin. Fighting between Soviet forces and CIA-funded Afghans (including the nefarious Osama bin Laden) continued, year after year, demoralizing the Red Army, draining the Soviet economy, and stirring up political unrest. Perhaps the most serious long-term consequence was the effect on Islamic fundamentalism in the Central Asian republics and growing independence movement in Chechnya. In 1988 the USSR signed an agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan, a process that was completed by February 1989. (Warfare continued between the Khalq regime and rebel forces. The CIA ended its involvement in 1992, and the pro-Soviet government eventual gave way to the Taliban.) An estimated one million Afghans were killed between 1979 and 1989, along with 15,000 Soviet troops.
In March 1989 the first openly contested elections
since 1917 were held. The Soviet Congress elected Gorbachev by an
overwhelming margin of 1,329 to 495 votes. In May, President Gorbachev visited Beijing, signaling the end
of the Chinese-Soviet split. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews left the
country after emigration restraints were removed.
Gorbachev openly criticized the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe who were
not attempting reforms similar to glasnost. Frantic, last-minute efforts at
reform by Eastern European leaders in the summer and fall of 1989 at best
only slowed the collapse of their Communist governments (dramatically
demonstrated by the demise of the
Berlin Wall). The loss of dominance over
Eastern Europe stunned conservatives in the military and the Soviet
Communist Party, and Gorbachev came under increasing pressure to slow
glasnost and perestroika.
The country's troubles continued. The economy did not respond as expected. The citizens of the Baltic states and Georgia demanded independence from the
Soviet Union. Arms reductions with the United States and a pact that
accepted the reunification of Germany were signed. In desperation, a group
of senior officials and the heads of the KGB detained Gorbachev at his dacha
in the Crimea on August 18, 1991, just two days before he was scheduled to
sign a treaty granting greater autonomy to the USSR's constituent republics. In three days, the August Coup collapsed, as junior military leaders and the
presidents of the republics, most notably
Boris Yeltsin
of Russia, led
popular resistance to the attempted coup. The coup leaders were arrested,
and Gorbachev was returned to his position as head of state. De facto power,
however, had passed to Yeltsin and the presidents of the other republics.
The Dissolution of the
Soviet Union
On August 23, 1991, Yeltsin banned the Soviet Communist Party and seized its
assets. The next day, Yeltsin recognized the independence of the Baltic
states; on the same day Ukraine declared itself an independent nation. The
Supreme Soviets of the other republics soon passed similar resolutions. In
September the Congress of People's Deputies voted for the dissolution of the
USSR, and discussions began which led to the December 8th founding of the
Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as
president of the USSR and was not replaced; on the same day the United
States recognized the remaining republics of the USSR as independent
nations.
Unanswered, and left for contemplation and discussion, are several
fundamental questions. To what extent was the USSR a threat to the United
States? Could he U.S. have done to prevent the death of nearly 100
million people brought about by Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism? Why
did the Cold War continue for over forty years and might it have ended
sooner if U.S. diplomacy had been wiser? What role did the U.S. play in the demise of the Soviet
Union? Did the Soviet Union contain the “seeds of its own destruction” (to
borrow a phrase from Marx) and simply collapse from its own internal
weaknesses (political repression, economic inefficiency, and corruption)?
Most intriguing is a question for the future: is the Soviet Union truly
dead, or will it one day re-emerge from the various fragments of the old
Red Empire?
[1] Both the Bolsheviks (led by Lenin) and Mensheviks (led by Kerensky) were revolutionary Marxists. Upon the victory of the Reds, Kerensky fled to Paris and emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1970. Karl Marx, with his colleague Friederick Engels, wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, calling upon the working class to rise up in rebellion. This influential publication fueled a wave of revolutions throughout Western Europe in the 19th century. Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism (which he described as an exploitive and corrupt system containing "the seeds of its own destruction") and the emergence of communism. He is considered the father of communist political theory. Marx was a political philosopher; Lenin was a political activist. Lenin's self-described role was "to organize the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the organization of a socialist society" [Ronald W. Clark, Lenin].
[2] In the winter of 1922-23, with his health failing, Lenin wrote a "testament" in which he predicted a split between Stalin and Trotsky upon the event of his death. Lenin warned that Comrade Stalin was "too rude" and "capricious" for the position of General Secretary, and that Comrade Trotsky, despite displays of "excessive self-assurance" was "perhaps the most capable man" in the Communist Party. This seemed to suggest that Trotsky was his choice for successor, but Stalin was too cunning for that to happen. With pride and defiance, Stalin later acknowledged to Party officials that Lenin was absolutely right: "I am coarse and heavy-handed toward those who perfidiously try to divide and destroy the Party. I have not concealed it. Perhaps you need a certain softness in dealing with rebels. But that is not in my nature" [Adam B. Ulam, Stalin:The Man and His Era]. Stalin had Trotsky ousted from the Party in 1927 and exiled two years later. In 1940 Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico.
[3] By 1932, over 1 million "kulaks" (opponents of collectivization) had been killed or arrested by Stalin's agents and sent to Siberia; an estimated 6 million people starved to death as a result of his campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture. (Horrible as that was, it pales next to Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which a 1858-61 famine killed perhaps as many as 30 million Chinese people.) It is estimated that Stalin's purge of party officials produced the imprisonment of at least 4 million people and the execution of 1 million. Precise figures are impossible to document because much of this was done secretly, and Stalin ordered the destruction or altering of census data and other government records.
[4] Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's secret police chief since 1938, was one of the triumvirate that assumed power upon his death. He suspended the purges, instructed the North Koreans to accept a stalemate bring the war there to an end, and he tried to allow more autonomy for Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. This was too much for his colleagues, who accused him of treason and had him shot. It was Khrushchev who disposed of Beria, and also pushed aside Georgii Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov (without having them killed). Despite his ruthless rise to power, Khrushchev always had the best interests of the Soviet people at heart. He ordered the brutal crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, but he was fundamentally humane and sincere in his commitment to Marxism.
[5] Sputnik ("fellow traveler") was successfully launched into orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. About the size of a basketball and weighing only 183 pounds, the harmless device sent Americans into a state of panic and ushered in an era of amazing scientific and technological developments. A second Soviet satellite, Sputnik II, was launched on November 3, carrying a terrier named Laika. The pressurized cabin, large enough for the little dog to comfortably stand, lie down, and move around a bit, was equipped with oxygen, food and water. Laika was fitted with a harness and electrodes to monitor her vital signs. Within a few hours after takeoff, she died from heart failure brought on by excessive heat and stress; but poor Laika was doomed from the start because early Soviet spacecraft had no means of safe re-entry. The first "American" in space was a squirrel monkey named Gordo (1958). In 1962 John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. [More Information: "Sputnik and the Start of the Space Race."]
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