VI.

History of the Soviet Union

This section continues the history of the Russian Empire, presented in the article on Russia, and highlights some of the pivotal events in the history of the Soviet Union.

A.

The Bolsheviks Gain Power

Chronologically, Soviet history may be said to have begun October 25 (or November 7, in the Western, or New Style, calendar), 1917. That was the day the Russian Revolution, the first phase of which overthrew Emperor Nicholas II the previous February (or March, New Style), culminated in the assumption of state power by the Congress of Soviets, made up of deputies from local soviets across Russia and led by the Bolsheviks. The militant wing of the Russian socialist movement, the Bolsheviks had been headed since their inception in 1903 by Vladimir Lenin, a career revolutionary who spent much of his adult life in exile in Siberia and Western Europe.

The congress formed a Council of People’s Commissars to act as its executive branch. The council was chaired by Lenin and had mostly Bolshevik members, but several other socialist parties were also seated. The Congress of Soviets, following Lenin’s lead, immediately resolved to withdraw Russia from World War I (1914-1918), in which it had suffered grievous losses to Germany and Austria-Hungary, and to seek “peace without annexations.” (The wavering Provisional Government, which ruled between the two phases of the 1917 revolution, had kept Russia in the war and even mounted a calamitous offensive.) The congress also issued decrees calling for the transfer of land from landlords to the peasants, the separation of church and state, and self-determination for all national groups in the former empire. Most Bolsheviks saw the last move as a temporary concession that would be superseded by the formation of a world proletarian state.

The Bolsheviks permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, which was to draft a democratic constitution, only to dissolve the assembly in January 1918 when they did not win a majority of seats. A constitution favoring Bolshevik control was then drafted, and in July 1918 the Congress of Soviets approved the first constitution of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

A.1.

Peace Treaty

Lenin was convinced that a speedy exit from the war was unavoidable, given the war-weariness of the population and the fragmentation of the imperial armed forces. Germany and the other Central Powers, eager to take Russia out of the conflict, agreed to open negotiations in December 1917 at Brest-Litovsk, Poland (now Brest, Belarus). The peace terms proved unacceptable to the Bolsheviks, and the talks broke down in January 1918. A German military advance on Petrograd (later Leningrad, then Saint Petersburg) helped persuade the Bolshevik leaders to create the Red Army, move their capital from Petrograd to Moscow, and reopen the talks. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, concluded on March 3, 1918, the Bolsheviks agreed to relinquish control over certain areas formerly annexed by the Russian Empire (including Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic lands) and pay heavy indemnities to Germany.

The treaty led to a schism within the infant government. The Left Social Revolutionary Party, which had been collaborating with the Bolsheviks, declared it a betrayal of the revolution and walked out of the Council of People’s Commissars. Activists in the party assassinated the German ambassador to Moscow, in the vain hope of stirring the Germans to renew hostilities, and made attempts on the lives of several Bolshevik leaders. Lenin was critically wounded by one of the terrorists, receiving an injury that contributed to his early death. The Bolsheviks, in return, launched the so-called Red Terror, suppressing the Left Social Revolutionaries and executing many political opponents. As other minority parties and factions were eliminated one by one, the Soviet system emerged as a one-party state.

A.2.

Civil War

Bolshevik political, economic, and social policies led to civil war and intervention by foreign powers. The motivations of the anti-Bolshevik forces were diverse and often muddled. In Siberia the Czechoslovak Legion—former World War I prisoners from the Austro-Hungarian army who were marching westward to join the Allied fight against Germany—came into armed conflict with local Bolshevik authorities. Allied forces, seeking initially to secure arms caches, occupied Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk, the principal cities of Russia’s far north. Japanese troops and an American expeditionary force landed in Vladivostok. Meanwhile, the Germans occupied Belorussia, Ukraine, and much of northern Caucasia. In addition, counterrevolutionary and therefore anti-Bolshevik forces known as the Whites occupied peripheral Russian lands. In the autumn of 1918 Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, at the head of a large White army in the east, proclaimed himself Russia’s “supreme ruler” and established his capital at Omsk in Siberia. Early in 1919 the Whites launched a three-pronged offensive with the aim of marching on Moscow. One White army under General Anton Denikin attacked from the south, another under General Nikolay Yudenich attacked from the west, and Kolchak’s army attacked from the east. Despite initial reverses, the Red Army, under Commissar of War Leon Trotsky, succeeded in repelling these campaigns by early 1920. In April of that year there was a new assault by the Polish army, with some help from White forces led by Baron Petr Wrangel. The Red Army counterattacked and fought the Poles to a standstill. The war officially ended in March 1921 with the Treaty of Rīga, by which Russia ceded western areas of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland. With the evacuation of Japanese forces from Vladivostok in October 1922, civil war and foreign intervention were at an end, and the Soviet regime was no longer in immediate danger.

The Bolsheviks’ control over the state apparatus and over the geographic heartland of the country helps explain their triumph. They outdid all their adversaries in the use of violence, applied by the VeCheka (political police), the Red Army, and squads of party supporters in the countryside. The White armies were disunited and poorly led, and the governments of the intervening countries were tired of fighting and unwilling to incur the losses that would have been needed to suffocate the new regime.

A.3.

Economic Imperatives

The Bolsheviks’ pursuit of a state-managed socialist economy, seen as the first step toward attaining communism, were embodied in the doctrinaire policies of War Communism. Implemented during the civil war, the austere measures of War Communism—such as seizing grain from the peasantry—contributed to widespread strikes and uprisings, while the economy was left completely exhausted. Even the sailors at the Kronshtadt naval base, known as ardent Bolshevik supporters, staged a revolt against the regime in March 1921. Trotsky and certain other leaders favored continuing the forced progress toward communism. Lenin, convinced that the revolution needed a “breathing space,” wanted a different course: demobilization of the Red Army, reduction of the requisitions of grain and produce from the peasants, and, for the time being, relaxation of controls over industry and trade. The Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), deferring to Lenin’s authority, adopted his New Economic Policy (NEP) at the Tenth Party Congress, also in March.

The NEP stimulated private initiative and quickly revived the economy. The Soviet Union achieved pre-World War I production levels in most sectors by 1926. This rebound prompted renewed debate about how to foster economic development on a socialist basis. Proponents of a continuation of the NEP said socialism should be built step by step, as economic development allowed. The NEP’s opponents, who were more vocal after 1926, maintained that it was entrenching private property and bourgeois (capitalist) elements and would never beget the savings needed for high-pace industrialization.

A.4.

Union Constitution and Recognition

The writ of the Soviet government ran at the beginning only in the RSFSR. Large tracts in Siberia and along its European periphery were held at one time or another by local nationalists, Communists, German forces, or the Whites. Lenin at first argued that relations with adjacent areas were not of decisive importance, since proletarian revolutions would soon occur there and in Western Europe as well. It was to this end that the Communist International, or Comintern, was founded in Moscow in March 1919 and instructed to split off uncompromisingly pro-Soviet parties from other socialist parties around the world (see International: The Third International). Although anti-Soviet uprisings did break out in several European countries, notably Germany and Hungary, they all fizzled out. The Soviets took a pragmatic approach to parts of the defunct Russian Empire that had taken advantage of the opportunity for secession offered in 1917. Whenever possible, they reasserted their domination, using a combination of military pacification and cooperation with local groups. When that was impractical, they reluctantly accepted the sovereignty of the nation in question. Peace treaties to this effect were signed in 1920 and 1921 with Finland, Poland, and the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

With armistices signed and the new sobriety about the prospects for world revolution, there was a searching discussion about what to do with parts of the former Russian Empire under direct or indirect Soviet control and inhabited, by and large, by ethnic non-Russians. Some, including Stalin (who was commissar of nationalities at the time), favored a unitary state in which there would be “autonomous” provinces for the minorities, with cultural rights. Lenin espoused a federal system in which the RSFSR would be only one of a number of republics, all of them possessing, on paper, equal legal and economic rights. Lenin prevailed, and in December 1922 agreement was reached between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and South Caucasus republics to establish the USSR. It took more than a year to work out concrete arrangements for the division of powers. The first constitution of the Soviet federation was ratified on January 31, 1924, a few days after Lenin’s premature death. The Communist Party itself was not federalized, and so functioned as a potent brake on decentralizing tendencies.

As the Soviet state moved to stabilize its political structures, the world powers, having initially attempted to ostracize it, entered into negotiations about the establishment of normal diplomatic and commercial relations. The breakthrough was the Treaty of Rapallo with Germany in April 1922. Diplomatic recognition soon came from other major powers, beginning with the United Kingdom in February 1924. The United States was the last major power to accord the Soviet government formal recognition, which it did in 1933.

B.

Stalin Era

The lingering sickness and death of Lenin occasioned a bitter struggle for power. The principal antagonists, Trotsky and Stalin, both claimed to be the rightful executors of Lenin’s policies. In contrast to Trotsky, who was primarily a theorist and a military leader, Stalin, the party’s general secretary since 1922, was a clever and determined organizer. Through his mastery of the Communist Party apparatus, he succeeded in winning the support of a majority of delegates to party conferences and in consolidating his rule. Trotsky was expelled from the party in November 1927. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928, and then banished from the Soviet Union the following year. In 1940 he was assassinated in Mexico by an agent of Stalin.

Having disposed of Trotsky, Stalin turned against his former allies in the struggle. These leaders, notably Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov, were driven from the higher councils of the party. In 1929, as he celebrated his 50th birthday, Stalin was hailed as the supreme leader of the party and the country. Thereafter, the dictator relied solely on his control of the party and the police and on cronies he had elevated to power. Important among these were Vyacheslav Molotov, Grigory Ordzhonikidze, Lazar Kaganovich, and Valerian Kuybyshev.

B.1.

Economic Transformation and Trauma

Stalin and the Soviet leadership renounced the NEP, and the measure of capitalism it permitted, in 1928. The inauguration of the first of the USSR’s Five-Year Plans that year began the era of the planned economy. Its basic aim was to harness all economic activity to the systematic development of heavy industry, thereby transforming the Soviet Union from an agrarian country into a leading industrial and military power and altering the very nature of society. Carrying the plan out, the Stalin government poured resources into the production of coal, iron, steel, railway equipment, and machine tools. Whole new cities, such as Magnitogorsk in the Urals, were built with the at times enthusiastic participation of young workers and intellectuals.

Economic transformation was accomplished at staggering human cost. Anyone who expressed reservations risked reprisals from the police. Ordinary newcomers to the cities often lived in wretched and unsanitary conditions. The collectivization of agriculture, a centerpiece of Stalin’s economic program, relied on brute force far more than on enthusiasm. In extensive sections of the Soviet Union—Ukraine, the Volga valley of the RSFSR, and Kazakhstan, in particular—starvation and epidemic disease were rampant from 1932 to 1935. By some estimates, between 5 million and 7 million peasants died in this state-made famine.

B.2.

The Great Purge

The mid- to late 1930s were marked by Stalin’s campaign to eliminate all elements alleged to have reservations about his policies. The process was touched off in December 1934 when a disgruntled party member assassinated Sergey Kirov, a popular and high-ranking party official. Although it remains unknown whether Kirov himself harbored doubts about Stalin’s line, the event served as Stalin’s justification to initiate a vicious purge of the party and of all Soviet institutions.

Stalin had any person he or his assistants distrusted removed from posts of authority; many were jailed, sent to the forced-labor camps of Gulag (Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps), or executed. In a series of three show trials in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, a number of once prominent Soviet leaders, including Grigory Zinovyev, Bukharin, and Rykov, were convicted and executed on concocted charges of conspiring with Germany and Japan to overthrow Stalin’s government. In a closed-door trial in June 1937, the topmost commanders of the army, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, were found guilty of similar charges and shot. Two-thirds of the 1934 Central Committee of the party was executed, as were more than half of the senior officers of the army. Furthermore, the political police, or NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), had license to extend the purges to lower-level officials and rank-and-file citizens. In the darkest years of the terror, from 1937 to 1938, the NKVD under Nikolay Yezhov rounded up several million people; as many as 1 million people were shot, while another 2 million are estimated to have died in the camps. In December 1938 Stalin’s appointment of a new NKVD chief, Lavrenty Beria, signaled the end of the mass terror, although some arrests and executions continued into 1939.

B.3.

Foreign Affairs

As Moscow saw it, international events in the 1930s increasingly endangered Soviet security. In East Asia, Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, and friction gradually mounted with Soviet forces stationed in Russia and Mongolia; sporadic clashes developed into serious border warfare in 1938. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 resulted in an even more menacing threat. Stalin initially instructed Comintern and the German Communist Party to cooperate with Hitler, seeing him as a harmless ally against liberal and democratic socialist parties. Stalin reconsidered as it became clear that the Nazis’ plans for expansion through military force were in earnest. The Soviet Union began to seek alliances with other European powers, especially France and Britain, to counter the threat and in 1934 joined the League of Nations. The Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Maksim Litvinov, repeatedly urged the members of the league to take concerted action for collective security against the successive aggressions of the several Fascist powers. The USSR also encouraged the formation within individual countries of so-called united-front, or popular-front, governments, in which Communist, socialist, and centrist political groups would collaborate against Fascist movements.

In the summer of 1938 a grave crisis arose when Germany demanded the cession by Czechoslovakia of Sudetenland, a border area with a large German minority. The Soviet Union offered to support the Czechoslovaks and called upon France and the United Kingdom to do the same. The French and British governments instead accepted Hitler’s assurance that Sudetenland was the final territorial acquisition he sought. The result was the Munich Pact of September 1938, providing for the transfer of the disputed land by Germany. In March 1939 the Germans dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia, occupying its capital, Prague, and creating a satellite state in Slovakia (the eastern part of the country).

B.4.

World War II

Engaged in a border war with Japan in the east and fearing Germany would turn on it in the west, the Soviet government began secret negotiations for an arrangement with Germany, meanwhile continuing talks, begun in April 1939, with France and the United Kingdom for an anti-German entente (understanding). On August 23, 1939, the Soviet government shocked the Western democracies as well as many Communists around the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Beyond improving the Soviet Union’s defensive posture, the agreement gave it an opportunity to carry out territorial expansion, something it had not had the strength to do since 1917. Confidential protocols provided for German and Soviet spheres of influence in Poland and for a free Soviet hand in Estonia and Latvia in the event of military conflict in the area.

That conflict was not long in coming. On September 1 Germany, emboldened by the pact with Moscow, invaded Poland, thereby provoking declarations of war by the United Kingdom and France and launching World War II. Sixteen days later the Red Army crossed the Polish frontier, took possession of eastern Poland, and began the Sovietization of the occupied areas. This would involve their incorporation into Ukraine and Belorussia and the deportation of thousands of Poles to Siberia. On September 29 Germany and the USSR signed another treaty modifying territorial arrangements in Poland and consigning Lithuania to the Soviet sphere. The Soviet Union then imposed agreements on the Baltic States giving it the right to base troops on their soil.

B.4.a.

The Winter War with Finland

Also during the fall of 1939, Stalin demanded of Finland that it hand over the southeastern section of the Karelian Isthmus as a buffer zone for Leningrad and that it permit the USSR to lease naval bases on the Finnish shore of the Gulf of Finland. Rejection of these proposals led to the undeclared Russo-Finnish War (also known as the Winter War), touched off by the Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30, 1939. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for its aggression. After a valiant but futile resistance, the Finns were overcome by the numerically superior Soviet forces. A treaty signed March 13, 1940, gave the USSR the land it sought and other strategic and economic advantages. The Karelo-Finnish region was promptly added to the galaxy of Soviet republics.

B.4.b.

Expansion in the Baltic and the Balkans

Soviet expansion continued during 1940. On June 15 and 16 the Soviet Union demanded free passage of troops and the formation of pro-Soviet governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Without waiting for acceptance of these demands, the Red Army moved in. Puppet governments were established and all resistance was extinguished. The USSR Supreme Soviet in early August annexed the three Baltic States as union republics.

The Soviet Union simultaneously extended its reach to the Balkans. It demanded that Romania surrender its regions of Bessarabia, which had merged with Romania in December 1918, and northern Bukovina. Romania complied and Soviet troops entered the regions on June 28. The central portion of Bessarabia was joined with a section of southeastern Ukraine to form the union republic of Moldavia, while the other territory acquisitions were merged into Ukraine. Germany concurred, but considered the whole affair an irritant and installed a client government in Bucharest. The Soviet Union, growing more wary of German intentions, renewed diplomatic contacts with Japan. On April 13, 1941, the two countries signed a five-year neutrality pact.

B.4.c.

German Invasion

Hitler began planning an attack on the Soviet Union in mid-1940 and signed the directive for Operation Barbarossa in December. Stalin, refusing to believe the worst, disregarded copious messages from his intelligence services about an impending aggression. When Germany finally invaded, on June 22, 1941, it came as a tactical surprise and caught the Red Army, already weakened by Stalin’s purges, at a terrible disadvantage.

The German assault changed the military and political alignment of the entire war, which now assumed global proportions. Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, and other Axis countries declared war on the USSR. The United States extended lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union; it ultimately provided some $12 billion worth of equipment and food. After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, it, Britain, and the Soviet Union became military allies. In January 1942, four months after it accepted the principles of the Atlantic Charter, the USSR and 25 other Allied countries signed the Declaration by United Nations, formally subscribing to the program and purposes of the Atlantic Charter and pledging their cooperation in the defeat of the Axis powers. In May 1943 the USSR dissolved Comintern.

The USSR’s war with Germany and its allies—the Great Patriotic War, as Stalin’s government called it—was a savage fight to the finish. The Axis assault was launched from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, striking for Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine. As the Red Army reeled back in disarray, Stalin began frantic efforts to remove industrial plants and workers from the path of the invaders and relocated them in and behind the Ural Mountains. Much of what could not be removed was intentionally laid waste.

For a time the German blitzkrieg (offensive) appeared successful, as millions of Soviet soldiers were encircled and annihilated or captured. In the Baltic States, Belorussia, and Ukraine, the invaders met a friendly reception from those who had suffered most under the Stalinist yoke. German atrocities, however, stiffened Soviet resistance. The advance on Leningrad was checked in September 1941, although the city was besieged until January 1944; casualties there exceeded 1.25 million. The drive on Moscow was stopped in December 1941 with German tanks about 30 km (20 mi) from the city center.

B.4.d.

From Stalingrad to Berlin

In the south the Germans were more successful; they took all of Ukraine and pressed on toward the Volga to sever Moscow and Leningrad from the Caucasus, where the USSR’s most productive oil fields were then located. In January 1943 German forces were finally halted and defeated in the epic Battle of Stalingrad (see Volgograd). It was the turning point of the Soviet-German war and one of the decisive engagements of world history. Thereafter the Germans were pressed steadily westward. In the spring and summer of 1944 the Baltic States and Ukraine were practically cleared of enemy forces; by the end of August, Soviet armies were fighting in Poland and Romania. Other victories followed. On April 24, 1945, Soviet forces encircled Berlin; the following day Soviet and U.S. troops met at the Elbe River, marking the complete Allied occupation of Germany. The Allied Powers then divided responsibility for administering Germany and the city of Berlin, putting the eastern sectors under Soviet control and the western sectors under the control of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The war in Europe ended on May 8.

Despite the 1941 neutrality treaty with Japan, Stalin had every intention of joining the war in the Pacific in time to benefit from it. His wartime allies were in favor, hoping that the entry of Soviet troops would hasten Japan’s capitulation. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945, the day after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In a series of swift moves against crumbling resistance, Soviet armies occupied most of Manchuria (now known as Northeast China), northern Korea, the Kuril Islands (then part of Japan), and the southern part of Sakhalin Island, which was also a Japanese possession at the time, although the USSR controlled the north. On the basis of these actions the Soviet Union claimed a share in the victory over Japan.

B.4.e.

Postwar Arrangements

The Soviet Union suffered grievous losses during World War II. Much of its European territory was devastated by mechanized warfare and the horrors of occupation. Official Soviet reports at the time stated that 20 million soldiers and civilians perished in the war, but it was later revealed, during Gorbachev’s time in office in the 1980s, that a more realistic figure for Soviet losses was between 27 million and 28 million. At this astronomic price, the Soviet Union subdued its bellicose neighbors, expanded its frontiers, and moved its troops into Germany, Eastern Europe, and formerly Japanese-held parts of East Asia. Bargaining over postwar arrangements afforded it recognition as one of the great powers of the world. Stalin participated with the American and British leaders at the Tehrān Conference in 1943, the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and the Potsdam Conference later in 1945 to decide the overall military and political strategy of the war and a common postwar European policy. The Soviets also played a leading role in the conferences leading to the establishment of the United Nations (UN) in 1945.

Instead of making a treaty immediately with defeated and disorganized Germany, the victor nations temporarily designated four occupation zones. The eastern zone was assigned to the USSR. Berlin, surrounded by the Soviet zone, was divided into four sectors; its eastern zone was also assigned to the USSR. All were to be administered as parts of one country, with free trade among them. German territory east of a line formed by the Odra (Oder) and Neisse rivers was consigned to Polish occupancy pending a final peace settlement. The northern part of East Prussia was awarded to the USSR. The Soviets exacted huge reparations in the form of machinery and raw materials from the Soviet-occupied areas of Eastern Europe. During the postwar reconstruction of the Soviet economy, which had been devastated in the war, Germany and former Nazi satellites such as Finland also made reparations to the Soviet Union.

C.

The Cold War Begins

The wartime alliance was based on aversion to a common enemy, not on philosophical consensus or similarity of social system or way of life. Victory removed the mutual enemy and opened the coalition up to strains between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the two leading democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom. Stalin initially hesitated in his policy, unsure how far he could push Soviet interests and whether it would be necessary to alienate his wartime partners. At the Potsdam Conference, held on the heels of the victory in Europe, Stalin offended the United States and the United Kingdom by making demands they held to be in excess of the needs of Soviet national security. Despite the acrimony, the Allies reached agreement on the general lines of the occupation, on reparations policy, and on the German-Polish and Polish-Soviet demarcation lines.

Within several years, the Soviet Union violated many of these agreements and embarked on a sustained assault on the political, economic, and social structures of most of the countries it occupied. In late 1946 the former British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, presciently remarked that an “iron curtain” was descending across the middle of Europe. The Soviets used force and threats to press their advantage and by 1947 and 1948 gave Communist groups in Eastern Europe the green light to govern in roughly the same repressive way the USSR itself was ruled. In July 1947 Soviet foreign minister Molotov served notice that the USSR would not participate in the Marshall Plan, the American program for reviving the postwar economies of Europe (see European Recovery Program). In a return to the spirit of an earlier age, the USSR established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) as a successor to the defunct Comintern with the cooperation of eight other Communist countries. As Moscow shirked cooperation and turned inward, the Western countries committed themselves to the globe-girdling political, diplomatic, and economic conflict between blocs—and for the most part between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union—known as the Cold War.

C.1.

Takeover in Eastern Europe

In the European countries where Soviet influence was paramount during and after World War II—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and East Germany—political structures were reorganized in stages. Local Communists first cooperated in coalition governments in which they controlled the ministries directing the police, the army, and the economy. This was followed, beginning in 1945, by the institution of 'people's democracies,' Soviet-type regimes under Communist control domestically and subservient to the USSR in foreign policy. Opposing political factions were isolated and then destroyed, large land holdings were expropriated, and (with the exception of Poland) farms were collectivized; virtually all industry was nationalized. Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in Eastern Europe between the two world wars, was the last to come under Communist control in February 1948, through subversion of a coalition government. That same year, Yugoslavia, having acquired a Communist regime led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, resisted Soviet efforts to dictate to it and was expelled from Cominform.

Developments in Eastern Europe, and the 11-month Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948-1949, alarmed the United States and Western Europe and led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. To coordinate the economies of the countries under its control, the USSR in 1949 established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON or CMEA), with all the Communist states of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia as members.

C.2.

Relations with China

In August 1945 the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Republic of China’s Kuomintang (KMT) government, granting it economic concessions and defense facilities, as previously agreed upon by the wartime Allies. Although the Soviets promised to respect KMT sovereignty in Manchuria, they stripped the region of nearly all of its industrial machinery, resisted efforts by the Chinese government to reestablish its authority, and gave arms taken from captured Japanese soldiers to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the KMT’s adversary in a civil war. When Soviet troops withdrew, all Manchuria fell to the CCP. The subsequent victory of the Chinese Communists over the KMT in 1949 altered the balance of power in Asia to the momentary advantage of the Soviet Union.

D.

Struggle for Leadership

Stalin, although increasingly erratic and paranoid as he grew old, remained in control until his death in March 1953. A collective leadership took power after his death. It was headed briefly by Georgy Malenkov, who was chosen CPSU first secretary and premier of the government. Other key figures included Molotov (reinstated as foreign minister), Beria (minister of internal affairs), Nikita Khrushchev (party secretary), Kaganovich and Nikolay Bulganin (first deputy premiers), and Kliment Voroshilov (ceremonial head of state).

The ruling group soon fell out among themselves. Malenkov lasted as chief organizer of the party for only one week and was eclipsed there by Khrushchev, whose title was elevated to CPSU first secretary in September 1953. The ambitious Beria was arrested in June and denounced for “criminal and antiparty activities”; in December 1953 the Kremlin announced he had been tried for treason, found guilty, and shot. Malenkov was demoted in February 1955 and replaced as head of government by Bulganin, a confederate of Khrushchev.

E.

Khrushchev Era

The struggle for power finally resulted in the triumph of Khrushchev. Using many of the patronage techniques pioneered by Stalin in the 1920s, he packed the CPSU apparatus with officials friendly to him. The 20th Party Congress in February 1956 promoted many of his sympathizers to leading positions. In June 1957, in a climactic assembly of the party’s Central Committee, he ousted Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others. In 1958 he forced Bulganin to resign and stepped into the premiership, continuing as party first secretary. By 1960 Khrushchev was in complete ascendancy, receiving many accolades to his leadership at party gatherings.

E.1.

Domestic Policies

The removal of Beria in 1953 gave the other CPSU leaders the opportunity to clip the wings of the political police. Inmates of the Gulag camps began to be freed in 1954 and tribunals started to process the posthumous “rehabilitation” of the reputations of many of those murdered under Stalin.

In a startling move at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered an address to a closed meeting of the delegates asserting that Stalin had replaced the legitimate Soviet leadership with a “personality cult” to his own glory, with catastrophic consequences for the party and the country. Among other things, Khrushchev charged that Stalin was guilty of “mass arrests and deportations” and of “the execution without trial and without normal investigation” of Communists and others. In addition, he said, Stalin had been morbidly suspicious of his Politburo colleagues, had not anticipated the German invasion and mishandled the war effort, and had jeopardized “peaceful relations with other nations.”

The “secret speech,” whose contents if not its exact wording soon leaked out into the press, stunned many Communists in the USSR and throughout the world. Khrushchev proceeded to implement a policy of de-Stalinization in which portraits of the late dictator were removed from public places, institutions and localities bearing his name were renamed, and textbooks were rewritten to deflate his reputation. At the conclusion of the 21st Party Congress in 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow where it had rested beside that of Lenin.

Khrushchev did not follow up these moves with systematic changes in the regime, however. No legal protections for free expression and political activity were enacted, and Khrushchev took offense when intellectuals overstepped the permitted bounds. He intensified political education and increased pressure on religious believers. While allowing some criticism of the shortcomings of central planning by Yevsey Liberman and other economists, he had no coherent strategy for overhauling the economy. His major economic initiatives were to bring marginal lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under agricultural cultivation and to relocate some industrial planning functions at the regional level. The first had some initial successes, but harvests deteriorated in the early 1960s; the regional reform of industry was ill-considered and had no positive impact.

E.2.

Khrushchev’s Fall

One effect of de-Stalinization was to reduce the level of fear within the Soviet leadership. With time, Khrushchev became overconfident and neglected to pay prudent attention to the performance of his appointees and to relations among them. Some of them lost faith in his impulsive leadership style; others were disillusioned by specific policy failures, such as poor harvests, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and his division of the CPSU apparatus into parallel industrial and agricultural hierarchies. In October 1964 the party leadership, having conspired for some time behind his back, stripped him of both his party secretaryship and the premiership. The plot was led by three members of Khrushchev’s inner circle: Leonid Brezhnev, a veteran party administrator and as of July 1964 the second-ranking CPSU secretary; Nikolay Podgorny, a fellow CPSU secretary; and Aleksandr Shelepin, the head of the KGB. The announcement of the change of leadership indicted Khrushchev for “voluntarism” and “harebrained schemes.”

F.

Brezhnev Era

Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as first secretary of the party (the position was changed back to general secretary in 1966). Aleksey Kosygin, a longtime industrial administrator, became chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier, while Podgorny was appointed chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Mikhail Suslov, the party’s chief of ideology, figured prominently in the leadership’s work. Its early announcements stressed collective deliberation and “businesslike” procedures.

Brezhnev asserted his primacy over his fellow leaders, but step by step and cautiously. Using his powers of appointment, he rewarded supporters with seats in the Politburo and other party organs at the CPSU congresses of 1971 and 1976. It was not until 1977 that he eased Podgorny into retirement and had himself selected head of state. Kosygin remained as premier until shortly before his death in 1980, although he was by then overshadowed by the general secretary. A Brezhnev personality cult blossomed in the late 1970s, as his memoirs were printed in huge editions and his patchy war record was extolled.

F.1.

From Stability to Stagnation

The watchword of Brezhnev’s 18 years in office was stability—continuity of personnel, procedures, and policy. He repudiated Khrushchev’s frequent shuffles of officials and reorganizations of governmental and CPSU structures. Unsatisfactory Khrushchev reforms, such as the bifurcation of the party apparatus and the shift of industrial planning to regional organs, were quietly reversed. Brezhnev praised professional and technical specialists for their contributions to administration and lauded 'scientific' methods that would take full advantage of expertise. Such changes of policy as did occur were slow to materialize and had leisurely schedules for implementation.

While such a style of rule may have been, for the officials below him, preferable to either Stalin’s inhumanity or Khrushchev’s bluster, and was enough to keep Brezhnev safe in office until his death, it proved to be very costly to the Soviet system. Timid changes in government operations were combined with severe and mounting intolerance toward expressions of preference for more fundamental changes in the regime. The Prague Spring of 1968, in which liberal Communists in Czechoslovakia attempted to craft “socialism with a human face,” showed that a reform-minded communism was a viable possibility in the Soviet bloc in at least the first half of Brezhnev’s reign. When a Soviet-led invasion force, with Brezhnev’s authorization, crushed the experiment, pessimism and cynicism about improvement of the system spread through Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. The second half of Brezhnev’s time in power was characterized mostly by the growing feebleness of the top leader and his colleagues and by an ever more apparent stagnation in institutions, policies, and ideas.

G.

Foreign Affairs

Once its system of satellite states was built up after World War II, Eastern Europe (and, for some time, China) was the area of most concern to the Soviet Union. With the United States and the Western alliance, relations were marked by alternating episodes of crisis and cooperation. An innovation of the post-Stalin years was the widening of contacts with the developing nations of the Third World, which Moscow saw as fertile ground for extension of its military, political, and economic influence.

G.1.

Relations with Eastern Europe

Soviet military and political relations with its satellite states in Eastern Europe were mainly bilateral until the mid-1950s. Formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955 gave the Soviet bloc a counterpart to NATO, increased military coordination, and provided a forum in which wider political issues could be considered. Cominform, founded in 1947 in an attempt to impose political uniformity on friendly states and movements, was disbanded in April 1956.

East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), constituted as a sovereign state in 1949, remained of special concern to Moscow. In June 1953 Soviet troops helped put down a rebellion of workers in East Berlin. The status of Berlin, where the border between the two German states was open, became a more hotly contested issue as West German prosperity induced hundreds of thousands of East Germans to flee through the divided city. In August 1961 the Soviet Union and the East German government built the infamous Berlin Wall, which prevented East Germans from freely emigrating to the West.

Tito’s Yugoslavia, which refused to cave in to Stalin in 1948, stuck to its separate identity and did not join either the Warsaw Pact or COMECON. Relations improved after the death of Stalin, only to decline again in the 1960s, especially after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. After 1961 the Soviet Union lost all influence in Yugoslavia’s small neighbor, Albania, which until 1978 remained closely allied with China.

The principal instrument for economic integration of the Soviet bloc was COMECON. Under plans worked out by the Soviet Union, and accepted with some qualifications by the member states, each country was to produce what it was best prepared for and purchase other products from the other countries. Opposition to this supranational system under Soviet domination developed, notably in Romania, which rejected its role as a basically agricultural and oil-producing country. Despite such dissatisfaction, additional economic links were later established, including an International Bank of Economic Collaboration. Pipelines carrying Soviet oil and gas to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany further integrated the economies of these nations with that of the USSR.

G.1.a.

Polish and Hungarian Crises

Soviet control of Eastern Europe was most seriously jeopardized in 1956, during the relaxation following the first wave of de-Stalinization. Popular discontent and rallies in Poland were followed by agreements in October and November 1956 providing for cancellation of some Soviet debts, the granting of additional credits, acceptance of the new Polish leadership under Władysław Gomułka, and continuance of Soviet troops in the country. In Hungary, student and worker demonstrations on behalf of national independence led to a change of government, a Soviet military intervention which killed thousands, and the formation of a new pro-Soviet government under J´nos Kád´r.

G.1.b.

Prague Spring

The next crisis, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, reflected the looser Soviet system of review after 1960 and the pressure for economic and social change within the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Clamor for reform resulted in the peaceful replacement of Antonín Novotný as head of the party and of the state by Alexander Dubček and Ludvík Svoboda, both Communists long loyal to Moscow. Soviet leaders were alarmed by the Prague Spring, particularly by the termination of censorship and talk of closer economic relations with the West. After weeks of relentless pressure failed to get the Czechoslovaks to drop the reform program, 600,000 troops from the Soviet Union, and token troops from all other Warsaw Pact countries except Romania, invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia on the night of August 20, 1968. Passive resistance—such as changing street signs to confuse the invading troops—lasted throughout the occupation, but the Warsaw Pact forces gradually won their way. Dubček was removed in April 1969, and the hated controls were reimposed.

The destruction of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia was reflected in tightened controls in the USSR and served to reassert the Soviet grip over all of Eastern Europe except Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania. It split what remained of the international Communist movement apart, alarmed the West, and delayed negotiations on nuclear disarmament.

G.2.

Relations with China

The Soviet Union immediately recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was established under Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1949, allied itself with it, and backed its demand to be seated in the UN in place of the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China (ROC), which was forced to relocate to Taiwan. Both the USSR and the PRC supported North Korea in the Korean War (1950-1953). The USSR extended technical and financial aid to China in the 1950s, and trade between the two countries increased.

Ties between the two largest Communist countries deteriorated after 1960. On the surface was an ideological disagreement over the interpretation of Marxism, especially with regard to revolutions in the developing countries. Underneath was the rivalry of two former empires, their leaders intensely nationalistic and eager for leadership of the rest of the Communist world. The jealousy surfaced in quarrels over their long common border and in the Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese in developing their nuclear technology. Clashes of border guards along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in 1969 raised the specter of war. Despite Soviet efforts to calm relations after Mao’s death in 1976, Soviet-Chinese rivalry continued unabated, as China encouraged the East European states to seek greater autonomy and turned to the West for military and economic aid.

G.3.

Relations with Other Asian Nations

The USSR supported the Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam after World War II and signed an agreement of cooperation with Ho in 1950. In 1954 the USSR participated in the Geneva Accords that divided the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and continued to support the Communist north, headed by Ho, when a struggle broke out between Communist forces seeking to reunite the country and U.S.-backed anti-Communists. As the Vietnam War (1959-1975) worsened during the 1960s, the Soviets staunchly supported North Vietnam and its guerrilla allies in the south. After the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, the Soviet Union supported a reunited Vietnam (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) in its conflict with China.

Soviet relations with other Asian countries were both conciliatory and aggressive. Premier Kosygin rendered an outstanding service to world peace in 1966 by mediating a new phase of the dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of Jammu and Kashmīr. In the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that ended with the formation of the state of Bangladesh, the Soviet Union supported victorious India, while both China and the United States sided with Pakistan. With Japan, a peace treaty ending World War II was never signed because of the Soviet Union’s refusal to return several small islands in the Kuril chain it had acquired in 1945.

In December 1979 the Soviet Union sent a large military force across the border into Afghanistan in an attempt to shore up a faltering Marxist government there. Amid condemnation from most of the rest of the world, Soviet troops continued to fight Afghan nationalist resistance and occupy the country. The war eventually cost about 15,000 Soviet lives and the lives of between 700,000 and 1.3 million Afghans before the Soviet withdrawal in the late 1980s.

G.4.

Relations with African Nations

Soviet interest in Africa was piqued by decolonization and the coming to power of leaders ready to see aid from Moscow as a solution to deep-seated problems. Attempts to gain influence suffered two notable setbacks in the 1960s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Soviet-supported Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was killed in an uprising in 1961; in Ghana, President Kwame Nkrumah and his socialistic government were overthrown in 1966 and Soviet technicians were expelled. In the 1970s the Soviet Union, with the aid of Cuban troops, helped a friendly government come to power in Angola and, having previously allied itself with Somalia, assisted Ethiopia in driving back an invasion by the Somalian army. It backed the antigovernment Patriotic Front (PF) in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.

The Soviet Union had close relations with Egypt, the largest of the Arab states, in the 1950s and 1960s. It supported Egypt when it nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, thus wresting it from British and French control. It also helped it build the Aswān High Dam and backed it in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 1971 the two countries signed a 15-year treaty of friendship. The following year Egypt, concerned with interference in its internal affairs, ordered Soviet military advisers to leave. Soviet criticism of President Anwar al-Sadat’s peacemaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977 further alienated Egypt.

G.5.

Relations with Western Europe

In 1955 the Soviet Union, an occupying power in Austria, agreed to the independence and neutrality of that country. The same year it established full diplomatic relations with West Germany. The West German “economic miracle”—a reminder of the powers of the market economy—and the country’s new Ostpolitik (German for “eastern policy”) to improve relations with the Soviet bloc increased the USSR’s misgivings about its position in an Eastern Europe tempted by Western trade, technology, and ideas. The Soviet Union championed East Germany against West Germany and caused repeated crises in their relations. The problem of West Berlin, surrounded by East German territory, was particularly thorny. Relations with West Germany improved at the end of the decade with the advent of a Social Democratic government in Bonn. In August 1970 the Soviet and West German governments signed a treaty renouncing the use of force to settle disputes and accepting existing European frontiers, including the Odra-Neisse boundary between East Germany and Poland. Tensions were further reduced when West and East Germany granted each other diplomatic recognition in 1973.

G.6.

Relations with the United States

Soviet relations with the United States after 1945 fluctuated with the general international climate and with the accidents of leadership in either country. The Cold War set limits to the cooperation each side could offer, yet the inherent dangers of the arms race forced the superpowers to maintain contact and continue to negotiate over differences. In 1962 the two countries had a dangerous clash over Soviet activities in Cuba, in what is known as the Cuban missile crisis. The USSR had maintained close relations with Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba, promising help in case of an American attack. When the Soviets stationed nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in Cuba in October 1962, U.S. president John F. Kennedy demanded their withdrawal; Khrushchev yielded and ordered the rockets removed. Moscow continued to support the Cuban economy through trade, credits, and technical aid. Cuban advisers and soldiers helped advance Soviet policy in Africa and Asia after 1976.

G.6.a.

Arms Control

In 1954 and again in 1959, the USSR suggested total disarmament and destruction of nuclear stockpiles, but this was mostly for propaganda value. The proposals were stymied when the Soviets rejected provisions for inspection to verify such an agreement. In 1960 Khrushchev unilaterally announced a reduction of about one-third in the Soviet military establishment. Again, the Western alliance nations would not respond in the nuclear sphere without inspection provisions more stringent than Moscow would accept. An issue of special interest was the limitation of tests of nuclear weapons. In 1963 the Soviet Union signed a treaty with the United States and Great Britain prohibiting all nuclear tests except underground. It also joined the United States in agreeing to keep outer space free of armaments. A series of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the two powers, begun in 1969, resulted in agreements in 1972, 1974, and 1979, placing quantitative and qualitative limits on nuclear weapons arsenals and delivery systems.

G.6.b.

Détente

At the same time as it bulked up its military strength and actively sought to extend its influence, the Soviet Union showed a marked drive toward détente (a relaxing of tensions) with the West, especially the United States. General Secretary Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko saw it as a mark of the USSR’s superpower status that it could reach agreements with Washington on an equal basis. In May 1972, during a Moscow visit by U.S. president Richard Nixon, he and Brezhnev signed agreements on medical research, environmental protection, science and technology, space ventures, avoidance of incidents at sea, and arms limitations. After these came settlement of the World War II lend-lease debt, a trade pact, and cultural exchange programs.

Efforts to reach a new SALT treaty after 1975 were hampered by Soviet-bloc repression of dissidents, the USSR’s involvement in Angola and other African countries, and continued Soviet support of the Arab cause against Israel. Nonetheless, agreement was reached in May 1979, and Brezhnev met with U.S. president Jimmy Carter in Vienna for a formal signing one month later. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December of that year doomed ratification of the accord by the U.S. Senate.

U.S.-Soviet relations worsened during the early 1980s. Washington condemned the Soviet role in the suppression of dissidence in Poland in 1981 and its shooting down of a South Korean civilian aircraft in Soviet airspace in September 1983.

H.

Gorbachev Era

Brezhnev, after many years of poor health, died in November 1982. His successor as CPSU general secretary and head of state was Yury Andropov, a former chairman of the Soviet political police, the KGB. Andropov attempted a disciplinary approach to Soviet problems, but soon disappeared from public view and succumbed to illness in February 1984. After him, Konstantin Chernenko, a member of Brezhnev’s entourage for 35 years, lasted only 13 uneventful months before he, too, died in office. On March 11, 1985, the Central Committee appointed the 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo, as general secretary.

H.1.

Glasnost and Perestroika

Gorbachev, an agricultural specialist from the southern Stavropol’ region of the RSFSR, followed the classic Soviet path to cementing his personal power, putting sympathizers into influential positions and shuffling the leadership. But his six and one-half years in office were anything but conventional. Without intending to do so, Gorbachev triggered a revolution that unseated him and the Communist regime.

Gorbachev first seemed content to copy Andropov’s crackdown on corruption and sloth, unseating some longtime comrades of Brezhnev and Chernenko and announcing a campaign to curb alcohol consumption. Beginning in 1986, Gorbachev, dissatisfied with the meager results of preceding decisions and prodded by the painful revelations of incompetence accompanying the Chernobyl’ nuclear disaster, struck off in a much more radical direction. He called for glasnost (openness or candor) in the media and culture and for a far-reaching perestroika (restructuring) of the nation’s economy and political system, and it soon was apparent that he was aiming at no less than the comprehensive reform of the Soviet system. He originally believed this could be accomplished without doing away with its socialistic features or with the CPSU’s monopoly on power. Within several years, though, discrepancies multiplied between his desire to retain the fundamentals of the old order and his determination to press ahead with perestroika.

Gorbachev never did achieve a deep-cutting reform of the Soviet economy. His main accomplishment was to legalize individual entrepreneurship and small cooperative businesses, an initiative he several times compared to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. Throughout, the state sector remained dominant and resistant to change. Without going so far as to reform the planned economy comprehensively, Gorbachev’s government disrupted its operations, provoking a further slowdown in growth and, beginning in 1990, a contraction in the Soviet Union’s gross national product (GNP). Shortages of consumer goods burgeoned and protest strikes by miners and other workers erupted.

Gorbachev’s most concerted efforts were in the political arena, where he announced to the party Central Committee in January 1987 that it was time to inaugurate competitive elections presenting the voter with a multiplicity of candidates, replacing the no-choice ballots that had been universal since the 1920s. A national conference of the CPSU in June and July 1988 approved Gorbachev’s plan and resoundingly denounced Stalinism, Brezhnevite stagnation, and the suppression of freedoms of expression, assembly, and organization. Several months later the USSR constitution was amended to safeguard electoral choice among candidates and to replace the Supreme Soviet with a 2250-member Congress of People’s Deputies. Elections to the congress were held all over the Soviet Union in March and April 1989. Although members of the CPSU still occupied the vast majority of seats, many functionaries of the party were defeated, while former political dissidents such as physicist Andrey Sakharov gained entry to the legislature. Gorbachev himself was selected the first chairman of the congress.

Gorbachev’s difficulties multiplied after the congressional election. On one flank, he was more and more estranged from conservative leaders within the CPSU establishment, who began to charge him with deserting the party’s cause. On the other flank, he was unable to satisfy the more thoroughgoing reformers who came to the fore in the election process. The acknowledged leader of the “democrats,” as they described themselves, was Boris Yeltsin, a former candidate member of the Politburo whom Gorbachev excluded from the leadership in October 1987 but who staged a flamboyant comeback in the 1989 election. To shore up his centrist position and increase his leverage with conservatives in the CPSU apparatus, Gorbachev had parliament in March 1990 institute the office of USSR presidency and select him to it.

In 1990 the center of progressive opposition to Gorbachev shifted to the union republics, which now proceeded to reelect their legislatures under the amended rules. Eager to placate critics, the Central Committee and the Soviet parliament agreed to change the constitution to allow non-Communist parties—and not merely individuals—to take part in political life. In March 1990 the voters of the RSFSR gave an insurgent faction named Democratic Russia a narrow plurality in the republic’s parliament. Yeltsin was elected chairman of the assembly by a razor-thin margin in May. On June 12, 1991, he was elected the first president of Russia, in a republic-wide popular election contested by six candidates.

H.2.

Foreign Policy Initiatives

Gorbachev deserves as much credit as any head of state for the end of the Cold War. One of his first personnel changes was to replace the longtime Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko, with Eduard Shevardnadze, the CPSU first secretary of the Georgian SSR. Between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev held a series of path-breaking summit conferences with U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. At his meeting with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, the two leaders exchanged bold new arms reduction proposals, although negotiations foundered over the Soviet demand for limitations on the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a military research program for developing an antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system. Gorbachev and Reagan signed an agreement in December 1987 to eliminate medium-range and certain shorter-range missiles in Europe. In May 1990 Gorbachev and Bush initialed a treaty to end production and reduce stockpiles of chemical weapons, and in July 1991 they signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) requiring substantial cuts in strategic nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev’s gambits in other areas of foreign policy were equally striking. He and Shevardnadze agreed in April 1988 to the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It was completed by February 1989; in October Soviet leaders acknowledged that the 1979 intervention had “violated the norms of proper behavior.” In December 1988, at the UN General Assembly, Gorbachev announced unilateral reductions in conventional forces, notably in Eastern Europe and along the China-USSR border. During his visit to Beijing in May 1989, China and the USSR agreed to resume normal relations after a 30-year rift. At a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome, Gorbachev promised that the Soviet Union would allow full religious freedom, and the USSR and the Vatican agreed to establish diplomatic ties. Relations with Israel also improved, as the Soviets relaxed restrictions on Jewish emigration. After August 1990, with tensions rising in the Persian Gulf, the USSR generally supported the U.S.-led effort to use economic and military pressure to force Iraq to give up its annexation of Kuwait.

I.

Communism in Crisis

Among the most audacious departures from past policy was the refusal of the USSR to intervene in Eastern Europe when popular pressure for political transformations there gained steam in 1989. Largely for this reason, reform movements were able to oust Communist governments all across the Soviet bloc. In the most dramatic change, the Berlin Wall was torn down and Communist East Germany merged with West Germany, forming a united Federal Republic of Germany. Unwilling to expend resources on sustaining old structures in the area, and increasingly distracted by domestic developments, the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its troops from Eastern Europe and to dissolve COMECON and the Warsaw Pact, two cornerstones of its postwar foreign policy.

These revolutionary changes were soon echoed inside the USSR. Events might conceivably have taken a different turn in the short term had Gorbachev been willing either to use military force to contain the swelling discontent or, alternatively, to resign from the CPSU and attempt to take charge of the democratic movement. Doing neither, he was caught in a pincer between conservative and liberal factions and points of view.

The beneficiaries of the growing disarray in Gorbachev’s administration were the union republics, hollow shells for much of their existence but now suddenly able to challenge Moscow. Their governments newly elected in 1990, the republics profited from long-suppressed nationalism, from hopes they would be more adept than the center in reforming the economy, and from a belief that only they stood in the way of complete chaos. One by one, the republic parliaments adopted resolutions affirming their sovereignty and the primacy of their laws over Soviet legislation. In several cases, notably in Lithuania and Georgia, the republic went so far as to assert its complete independence from the Soviet Union. The RSFSR, whose legislature passed a sovereignty resolution on June 12, 1990, became more and more of a thorn in Gorbachev’s side as Boris Yeltsin bid for popular support in what became an acrimonious duel with the Soviet president. Gorbachev, having vacillated for a year between oppressive and conciliatory policies, gambled in the spring of 1991 on an effort to renegotiate with the republics the 1922 treaty that had formed the USSR. A draft Union Treaty was worked out that the RSFSR and six or seven other republics were prepared to initial on August 20, 1991.

The signing ceremony never took place, for on August 19 a group of Communist hard-liners in the highest councils of the regime—spearheaded by Gorbachev’s prime minister, vice-president, defense minister, and KGB chief—attempted to impose a national state of emergency and to force him to go along with the decision. The coup failed abjectly. Yeltsin, having rallied pro-democracy forces in front of the Russian parliamentary building, emerged as the hero of the hour. On August 22 the army withdrew its tanks from Moscow and the leaders of the plot surrendered. Gorbachev, discredited by his inept handling of the crisis, never recovered from it. On August 24 he resigned as general secretary of the CPSU. Within several days the Communist Party’s activities had been suspended; in November 1991 Yeltsin dissolved it, making it defunct within the borders of the RSFSR.

I.1.

Republics Secede

Between August 20 and August 31, eight union republics (Estonia and Latvia in the Baltic region; Ukraine, Belorussia, and Moldavia in the European USSR; Kirgizia and Uzbekistan in Central Asia; and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus) joined Lithuania and Georgia in declaring their independence. The Tajik, Armenian, and Turkmen republics followed in September and October, leaving only the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, legally speaking, as members of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin unilaterally asserted Russian control over many of the remaining organizational and financial assets of the USSR. On December 7, 1991, six days after a referendum in Ukraine overwhelmingly backed Ukrainian independence, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Belorussian heads of state in Belorussia. The three leaders signed an agreement proclaiming the Soviet Union to be defunct and announcing the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose grouping of the three Slavic republics without any central state structure. Eight other republics joined the CIS two weeks later. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev announced his resignation as president in a solemn television address. The rump Soviet parliament passed its final resolution, acknowledging the dissolution of the Soviet Union, on December 26. On December 31 all residual functions of the first Communist state ceased: The USSR no longer existed.

J.

Soviet Legacy

The collapse of the Soviet Union paved the way for remarkable turmoil in the area. The CIS, to which all the post-Soviet countries except Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are signatories, has been a feeble presence. The newly independent states have for the most part gone their own way, choosing markedly different trajectories in the process.

The Baltic States have by general agreement made the most rapid advances in the direction of a functioning market economy and democratic institutions. In most of Central Asia and in Belarus (formerly Belorussia), reforms have been much thinner and patterns of government have a pronounced neo-Soviet air. The Russian Federation (formerly the RSFSR) and Ukraine occupy a middling position, with some progress in both the economic and the political domains counterbalanced by signs of the same lack of vision for which Gorbachev was faulted before 1991. Civil wars and extreme instability have grievously impeded development in Moldova (formerly Moldavia), Tajikistan, and the countries of the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan).

Despite their legal divorce from the Soviet center, the successor states share many common and overlapping problems. Trade patterns have been disrupted by economic reform, tariff and currency barriers, and the preference of many exporters (such as the Russian oil and gas industry) to sell their products in markets outside the confines of the former USSR. Environmental degradation continues in many parts of the former Soviet Union, and the resulting pollutants do not respect international borders. Territorial disputes have set many of the former republics off against others. One conflict—between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh area—has already resulted in deadly violence and ethnic cleansing. The potentially most dangerous dispute is between Russia and Ukraine over possession of the Crimean Peninsula in southeastern Ukraine, which is populated largely by ethnic Russians.

A fortified CIS could possibly deal with some of these problems. Bilateral and multilateral agreements of a more specialized nature may also have their place. The expectations and ambitions of the Russian Federation are pivotal to future developments. While many Russians have a sentimental attachment to the Soviet past, and regret that the USSR’s collapse diminished their country’s standing in the world, the Russian Federation for the foreseeable future is likely to be too weak and divided to systematically reassert Russian interests in the former union republics.