The U.S.S.R. A nation that arrived in the world accidentally, and departed unexpectedly. Over a century after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. Gorbachev thought that he had secured verbal assurances from German foreign minister Kohl and US secretary of state James Baker that US-led NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe in the wake of the unravelling of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, not even into a newly unified Germany. Perhaps he had, but Gorbachev should have remembered never to trust the capitalists – and, as a lawyer, he should have known that you get your assurances in writing. By October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany and became, ipso facto, a part of NATO.” The same happened in the other Soviet states (Transcaucasian republics, Ukraine, and Belarus) and, particularly, in the three Baltic states assigned to Russia after WW2. The whole USSR was seething with separatist movements and, ironically, it was a non-USSR state, East Germany, that sealed the fate of the USSR. East Germany came under communist control at the end of WW2 but was never formally admitted into the USSR, similar to other east European communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Yugoslavia. In November 1989, the world watched at East Germans tore down the hated Berlin Wall and poured into West Berlin thus starting the process of Germany’s reunification. This very emotional moment in history gave strength of purpose to all other USSR and satellite states and on the 26 December, 1991, the dissolution of the USSR was complete. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned the day before saying his General Secretary office no longer existed and handed over his President of Russia position to Boris Yeltsin. When Yeltsin died in 2007, Vladimir Putin became the President and remains so to this day. The aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. Leonid Brezhnev reversed many of Khrushchev’s liberalisation policies and throughout his eighteen years in power, Brezhnev reverted to the Stalinist model using repression and fear to implement his agricultural and military policies, and did very little to de-escalate the Cold War with Europe and the USA despite his support of détente. Although Brezhnev built up the USSR’s military might, including nuclear weapons, his agricultural and other manufacturing policies at home failed and the economy of Russia stagnated. She has had an impressive career. Born in Melbourne in 1941, she completed a BA in Soviet music (she played violin for the Australian Youth Orchestra, 1957-59) and history from the University of Melbourne in 1961 followed by a PhD from Oxford in 1969 on Soviet education. From 1969 -1972 Fitzgerald was a Research Fellow at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population.During the height of Stalin’s terror campaign, a period between 1936 and 1938 known as the Great Purge, an estimated 600,000 Soviet citizens were executed. Millions more were deported, or imprisoned in forced labor camps known as Gulags. The Cold War

Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was taken first by Georgy Malenkov, who lasted just six months and was then ousted by Nikita Khrushchev who almost immediately began the process of de-Stalinisation – the dismantling of Stalin’s reputation and rebuilding of the Soviet Union along less repressive lines. Khrushchev’s agricultural and industrial policies largely failed and he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 who stayed as general Secretary until his death in 1982. Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov who lasted two years before being replaced by Konstantin Chernenko who, one year later in 1985 and following Chernenko’s death, was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, the unwitting architect of the dissolution of the USSR.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes. Before he became the eighth and final General Secretary, Gorbachev was a keen supporter of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation program and was heavily influenced by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and subsequent attempts to cover up what had happened. He also felt that Russia and the whole USSR was in desperate need of social reform and, in 1985 when he became General Secretary, he implemented his two famous programs of perestroika and glasnost. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, was aimed at reforming the policies and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to become more like the western free-market system based on democratic elections and an embracing, rather than repression, of different cultures and religions. Glasnost, meaning openness and transparency, was a program introduced at all levels of government aimed at encouraging constructive criticism of local and national programs, something that would have never happened under Stalin’s rule. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. Sources: Historians’ narratives tend, by their nature, to make events seem inevitable…. But this is not my intention with this Shortest History. My view is that there are as few inevitabilities in human history as there are in the individual lives that compose it. Things could always have turned out differently but for accidental encounters and global cataclysms, deaths, divorces and pandemics...." Deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and neighboring China and food shortages across the USSR eroded Khrushchev’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Communist party leadership. Members of his own political party removed Khrushchev from office in 1964. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Program

This is, however, quite normal. Since the end of the Cold War the US foundations, Western universities spent millions on the researchers who dove into the Soviet archives and found evidence after evidence of the virtues of capitalism. An intellectual Cold War on the Soviet history is waged after 1991 and the balance of forces favours heavily the imperialist camp this time.One of the great virtues of such short histories is that they emphasise what specialists may regard as the bleeding obvious – but it is the obvious truths often buried in detail that bear restating.’ —Owen Matthews, The Spectator On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology. In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries came to power in the war-torn Russian Empire in a way that defied all predictions, including their own. Scarcely a lifespan later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed as accidentally as it arose. The decades between witnessed drama on an epic scale—the chaos and hope of revolution, famines and purges, hard-won victory in history’s most destructive war, and worldwide geopolitical conflict, all entwined around the dream of building a better society.