"Capitalist fairy tales begin with, 'Once upon a time there was…' Communist fairy tales begin with, 'Someday there will be…'"
A simple history of the world's first Communist country, with humour where appropriate. But first, a brief note on social historiography.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, sociopsychological historians of the 1990s became baffled at just how contented—if not outright happy—most people seemed to have been living under Josef Stalin despite how incredibly difficult life was for them. By the late 2000s they recognised that they had made the mistake of assuming that the Soviet "man in the street" had always possessed the cynicism and disillusionment which he had demonstrated during the USSR's twilight years and ultimate suicide. Today it is accepted that in fact, the early years of the Soviet experiment were marked by strong popular belief that they could create a man-made heaven on earth—and that they were willing to endure incredible hardships to bequeath it to their children.
Cynicism and disillusionment grew as it became increasingly clear that the Soviet system could not deliver its promise of a utopian future. Ultimately, this was why the Soviet peoples demanded and accepted its end.
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Colour Clashes: Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Civil War
After Red October overthrew the government that overthrew Tsarist Russia, the Bolsheviks ended up being one of the major players in the world's largest country. They also ended up with the continuing problem of World War I. They concluded a peace treaty with Imperial Germany, in the process giving up control of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, which became German puppets and, after Germany's defeat, either became independent or were retaken by the Reds. After concluding the war on highly unfavourable terms, there was another problem: not everyone was happy with the new government. This was first demonstrated in the Constituent Assembly elections, where the Bolsheviks were defeated. The Assembly held one meeting before being dissolved.
This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans, joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that event was of minor importance at the time (and was only confirmed years afterward). The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, Doctor Zhivago is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain, and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Leon Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined—the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were disunited, rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White—not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who wanted to kill lots of Jews).
The price was very high. Fifteen million Russians were dead, mostly via disease, famine and massacres (including White pogroms against the Jewish population). Another million White supporters, including most skilled Russian workers, left the country permanently to appear in many a Genteel Interbellum Setting work of fiction. What was left of Imperial Russia's attempts at industrialization lay in shambles and agricultural production wasn't much better off either. As part of the whole "worker-socialist state" thing, all remaining traces and links to the old monarchy were purged as well.
On 29 December 1922, a new union of republics (Russia with Belarus, the Communist Ukrainian government, and the states of Central Asia) was created. Its name in Russian was Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. The rest of the world could come to know of it as the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union, for short. To help get things going, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Lenin, implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP). This kept what was left of industry and manufacturing after the war under state ownership, but allowed some private ownership of agricultural land, and encouraged farmers to sell surpluses. This increased agricultural production greatly, but there were also problems with consumer goods prices and the "Scissors Crisis", a large difference in prices between industrial and agricultural goods compared to 1913, which was from 1923 to 1924, owing to the dilapidated state of Russia's industry.
In March 1923, Lenin suffered his third stroke. He was left bedridden and speechless for the remainder of his life, which ended the next year, in 1924. After his death, he was buried in Red Square. Well, not buried. He was built his own creepy dark mausoleum, where his embalmed dead body is still visible to the public.
This also led to a Civil War, in which the Allied powers, including the Americans, joined in. It was mainly "Red" versus "White" and very nasty, with massacres everywhere; the one that shows up most often in fiction is the murder of the entire Romanov royal family, although that event was of minor importance at the time (and was only confirmed years afterward). The civil war was hardly two-sided, as the nation was filled with dozens of small nationalist factions fighting for independence and a confusing rainbow of smaller armies such as the Blacks (anarchists), Blues (peasants rebelling against the Reds), and Greens (desperate peasants fighting everybody just for survival). If you want a glimpse of what happened at the time, Doctor Zhivago is best at describing the whole situation. Western powers like the US, Britain, and France sent some troops to help the Whites (because they were fighting against communism, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend). This mostly served to make the Whites look like puppets of foreign capitalists and imperialists, which didn't help with their street cred. Thanks to Leon Trotsky and the state seizing control of the entire Soviet economy to feed the Red Army (which became highly organised and disciplined—the commissars shooting people certainly helped), the Bolsheviks ended up the ultimate victors. The Whites were disunited, rather disorganised, and had difficulty mobilizing people to fight for their unclear vision, being forced to rely on Cossacks as soldiers who themselves wanted independence from Russia, Red or White—not to mention that they had no idea what to do with Russia if they won, since they were a wide alliance of anti-communist forces (ranging from non-Bolshevik socialists over moderate liberals to ultra-nationalists who wanted to kill lots of Jews).
The price was very high. Fifteen million Russians were dead, mostly via disease, famine and massacres (including White pogroms against the Jewish population). Another million White supporters, including most skilled Russian workers, left the country permanently to appear in many a Genteel Interbellum Setting work of fiction. What was left of Imperial Russia's attempts at industrialization lay in shambles and agricultural production wasn't much better off either. As part of the whole "worker-socialist state" thing, all remaining traces and links to the old monarchy were purged as well.
On 29 December 1922, a new union of republics (Russia with Belarus, the Communist Ukrainian government, and the states of Central Asia) was created. Its name in Russian was Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. The rest of the world could come to know of it as the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union, for short. To help get things going, the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Vladimir Lenin, implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP). This kept what was left of industry and manufacturing after the war under state ownership, but allowed some private ownership of agricultural land, and encouraged farmers to sell surpluses. This increased agricultural production greatly, but there were also problems with consumer goods prices and the "Scissors Crisis", a large difference in prices between industrial and agricultural goods compared to 1913, which was from 1923 to 1924, owing to the dilapidated state of Russia's industry.
In March 1923, Lenin suffered his third stroke. He was left bedridden and speechless for the remainder of his life, which ended the next year, in 1924. After his death, he was buried in Red Square. Well, not buried. He was built his own creepy dark mausoleum, where his embalmed dead body is still visible to the public.
The Paranoid Priest Candidate: Josef Stalin
Josef Stalin (born Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) was born in Gori, Georgia on 18 December 1878. He had an unpleasant childhood. His father beat him. When he went to school and later a seminary in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi (seminary was one of a few ways to get a free education in Russia at the time), he was forced to use Russian and mocked for his Georgian accent. Josef became a Georgian Marxist and a poet. He read a Georgian novel called The Patricide, which starred a Robin Hood style character called Koba. He adopted it as his first revolutionary pseudonym.
In 1899, he quit the seminary and became a revolutionary. The seminary says he failed to show up for his final exams. Official Soviet history says he was expelled for reading revolutionary literature. What really happened is up to your imagination.
After running as a criminal and bank robber (for needs of the Party), the-man-formerly-known-as-Dzhuga-later-Koba-but-now-Stalin ended up as one of the editors of Pravda (Da, pravda), a news sheet full of revolutionary truthiness that is in much-reduced existence today. His role in the Red October Revolution was pretty minor, no matter how much he tried to puff it up later. Stalin ended up as General Secretary of the Bolsheviks. Perceived as a unimportant position (he was dubbed "Comrade Card-Index"), it actually allowed him to pack the party with his own supporters.
The big argument among the Commies was between "World Revolution" (promote revolution in other countries, particularly the more industrialized countries, because it was believed that communism couldn't be built in a single agricultural country like Russia at the time) or "Socialism in one country" (build up the USSR and put Soviet interests first, because communism can be built in a single agricultural country and thus be a model for other revolutionaries). Stalin took the latter stance, Trotsky the former.
Before Lenin had become incapacitated, he dictated a Testament. While critical of the other senior Commies, its message to the party was very clear: Stalin must be removed because of his rudeness and conflict with Trotsky. However, the party ignored Lenin's testament, perhaps due to the efforts of the "troika"—a group of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev. It should be noted that the letter was not secret and was even published in Pravda, by now the most widely read newspaper of the USSR, on November 10, 1927. Initially, Stalin adhered to the position of the right—to preserve the NEP (although he was already somewhat breaking the market system and directing prices, but this was sporadic and not large-scale). But when the diplomatic crisis between the USSR and Britain began in 1927, the threat of war arose, and at the same time the problem of unpreparedness for war arose. Heavy and military industry was sorely lacking, according to Mikhail Tukhachevsky's report, in the event of war, the army could be equipped with 8% cartridges and 29% shells. Therefore, there was a so-called "left turn"—Stalin and his supporters, such as Vyacheslav Molotov, adopted some slogans of the Left opposition about the fight against the kulaks and the demand for accelerated industrialization. Trotsky, who may well have been tricked by Stalin into missing Lenin's funeral, was eventually kicked out of the USSR in 1929. After wandering Europe in exile for years, he eventually headed to Mexico, where The Stranglers now tell of how "he got an ice pick, that made his ears burn". Though it was actually an ice axe, he still ended up dead as it were embedded into his brain.
In 1899, he quit the seminary and became a revolutionary. The seminary says he failed to show up for his final exams. Official Soviet history says he was expelled for reading revolutionary literature. What really happened is up to your imagination.
After running as a criminal and bank robber (for needs of the Party), the-man-formerly-known-as-Dzhuga-later-Koba-but-now-Stalin ended up as one of the editors of Pravda (Da, pravda), a news sheet full of revolutionary truthiness that is in much-reduced existence today. His role in the Red October Revolution was pretty minor, no matter how much he tried to puff it up later. Stalin ended up as General Secretary of the Bolsheviks. Perceived as a unimportant position (he was dubbed "Comrade Card-Index"), it actually allowed him to pack the party with his own supporters.
The big argument among the Commies was between "World Revolution" (promote revolution in other countries, particularly the more industrialized countries, because it was believed that communism couldn't be built in a single agricultural country like Russia at the time) or "Socialism in one country" (build up the USSR and put Soviet interests first, because communism can be built in a single agricultural country and thus be a model for other revolutionaries). Stalin took the latter stance, Trotsky the former.
Before Lenin had become incapacitated, he dictated a Testament. While critical of the other senior Commies, its message to the party was very clear: Stalin must be removed because of his rudeness and conflict with Trotsky. However, the party ignored Lenin's testament, perhaps due to the efforts of the "troika"—a group of Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev. It should be noted that the letter was not secret and was even published in Pravda, by now the most widely read newspaper of the USSR, on November 10, 1927. Initially, Stalin adhered to the position of the right—to preserve the NEP (although he was already somewhat breaking the market system and directing prices, but this was sporadic and not large-scale). But when the diplomatic crisis between the USSR and Britain began in 1927, the threat of war arose, and at the same time the problem of unpreparedness for war arose. Heavy and military industry was sorely lacking, according to Mikhail Tukhachevsky's report, in the event of war, the army could be equipped with 8% cartridges and 29% shells. Therefore, there was a so-called "left turn"—Stalin and his supporters, such as Vyacheslav Molotov, adopted some slogans of the Left opposition about the fight against the kulaks and the demand for accelerated industrialization. Trotsky, who may well have been tricked by Stalin into missing Lenin's funeral, was eventually kicked out of the USSR in 1929. After wandering Europe in exile for years, he eventually headed to Mexico, where The Stranglers now tell of how "he got an ice pick, that made his ears burn". Though it was actually an ice axe, he still ended up dead as it were embedded into his brain.
Fifty Years in Ten: Industrialisation
To kickstart the Soviet economy, both industrial and agricultural, Stalin in 1928 started the first Piatiletka (Five-Year Plan; these would be continued until the collapse of the USSR). In 1931, he stated that "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." As events would go on to prove thirteen years later, he was right on the money about that.
Massive new industrial facilities were set up, such as the city of Magnitogorsk, where John Scott went Behind the Urals. Though it didn't make much sense at the time, the "behind the Urals" thing was done intentionally and would be very important later. Oil, iron and coal mining operations were ramped up, as were steel production and electricity generation efforts. Ambitious production targets were set up that required an increase of 250% over current production rates.
In any enterprise, there's always a bit of minor account fiddling, while the more criminally inclined may resort to cooking the books. What the Soviet people did in response to production targets amounted to throwing the books into the Magnitogorsk blast furnace and using the ashes to fill out the quota. Failure to meet production targets could mean sacking at best, a trip to The Gulag or at worst, a bullet in the back of the head. As a result, everyone exaggerated their manufacturing performance and produced lots of very shoddy goods. While this was a bit of a problem early on, this sort of practice would become disastrous many years down the line.
Nevertheless, industrialization was generally successful. Though few production targets were ever truly reached, productivity was much improved, and the state of the economy was certainly better than it had been for years. The First Five-Year Plan was declared finished early, though the Third would be terminated early by the start of the Great Patriotic War.
Massive new industrial facilities were set up, such as the city of Magnitogorsk, where John Scott went Behind the Urals. Though it didn't make much sense at the time, the "behind the Urals" thing was done intentionally and would be very important later. Oil, iron and coal mining operations were ramped up, as were steel production and electricity generation efforts. Ambitious production targets were set up that required an increase of 250% over current production rates.
In any enterprise, there's always a bit of minor account fiddling, while the more criminally inclined may resort to cooking the books. What the Soviet people did in response to production targets amounted to throwing the books into the Magnitogorsk blast furnace and using the ashes to fill out the quota. Failure to meet production targets could mean sacking at best, a trip to The Gulag or at worst, a bullet in the back of the head. As a result, everyone exaggerated their manufacturing performance and produced lots of very shoddy goods. While this was a bit of a problem early on, this sort of practice would become disastrous many years down the line.
Nevertheless, industrialization was generally successful. Though few production targets were ever truly reached, productivity was much improved, and the state of the economy was certainly better than it had been for years. The First Five-Year Plan was declared finished early, though the Third would be terminated early by the start of the Great Patriotic War.
Smert Kulakam!—Collectivisation
The other part of the Five-Year Plans was collectivisation. All that building of factories and machines that went along with industrialisation had to be financed somehow (and no one would loan the Soviet Union money then, party because they refused to pay back the Tsar's debts). Most of the USSR's people were peasants, so perhaps they could be persuaded to join large collective farms, work more efficiently and give up their surpluses (instead of selling them for something in return)—all for the rapid development of the motherland, of course. However, it turned out this wasn't the most popular of ideas. So Stalin decided to be a little more persuasive and take land from the peasants by force. Lots of force.
In the eyes of the CPSU there were four types of peasants:
In the eyes of the CPSU there were four types of peasants:
- Bednyaks, poor peasants
- Seredniaks, mid-income peasants
- Kulaks, rich land-owning peasants. The term was in use pre-Red October for independent farmers who hired labour and had large farms. It quickly become derogatory—the term literally means "tight-fisted".
- Batraks, seasonal landless workers.
It was decided that only the first and the fourth were true allies of the proletariat. The second were unreliable. The third were considered "class enemies", which was a very bad designation to have in the USSR. Kulak became a term that was applied to a whole lot of people (partly because there was no exact definition for how much one had to own to be a Kulak), often for purposes of revenge—naturally, some local peasants didn't hesitate before declaring their neighbours kulaks, however rich they were. When the Soviets tried to take their land, many of the "kulaks" proceeded to destroy their tools, kill their livestock and consume their produce. That caused a massive famine and the Soviet livestock population would not recover until after World War II.
Many people were either shot, sent to The Gulag or deported internally, with an especially severe famine, or deliberate genocide by starvation, hitting Ukraine especially hard. Precisely how many people died because of "dekulakisation" and the resulting famine is subject to historical debate
—the number could be anywhere from 3.5 million to 6 million. The problem is that it's not as if anyone signed death warrants or shot every person who died; most deaths were caused by the conditions that resulted from the famine. Nutrition disorders were not as well understood as they are now, and anyone who died of such illnesses or starvation would be cited as having died of natural causes. So, estimating the number of victims requires estimating how many deaths by natural causes can be blamed on the policies of Stalin's government. Good luck with that…
The Midnight Knock: The Purges
To say Stalin was a bit paranoid is a bit like saying Mount Everest is a bit tall or that space is really big. He became rather concerned about a man named Sergey Kirov, who was becoming more popular than him. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was heading to his office in Leningrad when he was shot in the back of the neck and killed. Whether Stalin was involved was never proven (Khrushchev thought so, but there's genuine debate). Kirov was publicly mourned by Stalin and got a lot of things named after him, both factual (the city formerly known as Vyatka, both "Kirov" classes of cruisers) and fictional (a space station in 2010 and a type of heavily armored zeppelin bomber).
Determined to deal with his enemies (real or imagined) and with Kirov's death as an excuse, Stalin first set up a bunch of show trials. Senior Bolsheviks like Nikolai Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were subjected to the Vanya Fermer Confession Obtaining Procedure, of the psychological sort and the stuff that leaves no marks, i.e., sleep deprivation. If they didn't agree to confess to false (sometimes even impossible) charges and appear in a show trial, they got a bullet in the back of the head. If they acquiesced (as they often did to save their families), they were placed on "trial" in front of cameras, accompanied by foreign observers and with the footage broadcast around the world. Then they were shot or hanged.
Under the NKVD leadership of Nikolai Yezhov (known as "The Poisoned Dwarf" because he was short and a real sadist), a series of events was implemented that has been variously called "The Great Terror", "The Great Purge" or "The Yezhovschina" ("Yezhov regime"). Whatever you call it, it was bloody. Soviet archives state that 681,692 were shot during 1937 and 1938 (which might be an understatement) and that 800,000 went to The Gulag. Families informed on each other, often just for telling anti-Stalin jokes. "Ex-kulaks" and "kulak-helpers" (which pretty meant anyone the NKVD were inclined to purge) were arrested. Even children were manipulated into informing the nice strangers about whether their parents have said or done something that may be worth their attention. The people of the USSR lived in fear of a knock on their door at midnight, which could mean a trip to The Gulag or worse.
The CPSU itself was purged. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were arrested and nearly all ended up dead. By the time the Second World War came to the USSR, Stalin had killed just about every single member of the original Bolshevik party (with the notable exception of his foreign minister, Molotov). This had a serious impact on the state of the Soviet armed forces, as almost the entire Soviet High Command ended up arrested or dead along with thousands of officers in between.
By 1938, Stalin and his cohorts realised they'd gone too far. They purged (that is, shot) Yezhov along with many others of his ilk, and replaced him with Lavrentiy Beria, who may well have been a sexual sadist and multiple rapist. More on him later. The purges were toned down (with Yezhov being blamed for "excesses"), but repression continued.
Determined to deal with his enemies (real or imagined) and with Kirov's death as an excuse, Stalin first set up a bunch of show trials. Senior Bolsheviks like Nikolai Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were subjected to the Vanya Fermer Confession Obtaining Procedure, of the psychological sort and the stuff that leaves no marks, i.e., sleep deprivation. If they didn't agree to confess to false (sometimes even impossible) charges and appear in a show trial, they got a bullet in the back of the head. If they acquiesced (as they often did to save their families), they were placed on "trial" in front of cameras, accompanied by foreign observers and with the footage broadcast around the world. Then they were shot or hanged.
Under the NKVD leadership of Nikolai Yezhov (known as "The Poisoned Dwarf" because he was short and a real sadist), a series of events was implemented that has been variously called "The Great Terror", "The Great Purge" or "The Yezhovschina" ("Yezhov regime"). Whatever you call it, it was bloody. Soviet archives state that 681,692 were shot during 1937 and 1938 (which might be an understatement) and that 800,000 went to The Gulag. Families informed on each other, often just for telling anti-Stalin jokes. "Ex-kulaks" and "kulak-helpers" (which pretty meant anyone the NKVD were inclined to purge) were arrested. Even children were manipulated into informing the nice strangers about whether their parents have said or done something that may be worth their attention. The people of the USSR lived in fear of a knock on their door at midnight, which could mean a trip to The Gulag or worse.
The CPSU itself was purged. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 1934 Party Congress, 1,108 were arrested and nearly all ended up dead. By the time the Second World War came to the USSR, Stalin had killed just about every single member of the original Bolshevik party (with the notable exception of his foreign minister, Molotov). This had a serious impact on the state of the Soviet armed forces, as almost the entire Soviet High Command ended up arrested or dead along with thousands of officers in between.
By 1938, Stalin and his cohorts realised they'd gone too far. They purged (that is, shot) Yezhov along with many others of his ilk, and replaced him with Lavrentiy Beria, who may well have been a sexual sadist and multiple rapist. More on him later. The purges were toned down (with Yezhov being blamed for "excesses"), but repression continued.
Rewriting History: The Cult of Personality and the Magic of Photoshop
Stalin was, like many an autocrat both before and after him, eventually determined to clean up and promote his image. Verily he did, so much that he wanted to be seen as nothing less than a god-figure in the otherwise atheist Soviet Union.
To that end, he made sure that his face was seen all over the USSR and his name was known by all. Hundreds of things were named (or renamed) after him. Statues of him were all over the USSR. People "wrote" poems praising him as the best thing since, well … sliced bread wasn't really around in the USSR then, so let's just say "Pushkin". Paintings and other works of art were made to depict him as either strong and decisive, or paternal and wise.
There was a bit of a problem, though: Stalin didn't play that big a role in Red October. He wasn't even all that important of a leader back in the Bolshevik days or during the conflict with the Whites. As the Fourth Doctor would say:
To that end, he made sure that his face was seen all over the USSR and his name was known by all. Hundreds of things were named (or renamed) after him. Statues of him were all over the USSR. People "wrote" poems praising him as the best thing since, well … sliced bread wasn't really around in the USSR then, so let's just say "Pushkin". Paintings and other works of art were made to depict him as either strong and decisive, or paternal and wise.
There was a bit of a problem, though: Stalin didn't play that big a role in Red October. He wasn't even all that important of a leader back in the Bolshevik days or during the conflict with the Whites. As the Fourth Doctor would say:
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
So, the "facts" were altered. Other Bolshevik leaders were "erased" from history and removed, rather expertly, from photos. New textbooks were issued to schoolchildren. As his former cronies were still being purged as quickly as they fell out of favour, new pages were given for pupils to paste over. Conversely, he also had photos altered so that any particularly notable instance (such as a meeting with Lenin) would show him as being there when he really wasn't. Other photos that showed his face were sometimes retouched to show him in a more favourable light—for an example of what this entails, compare the famous image of Che Guevara on a shirt to the original photograph. Most photographs of him actually edited out the blemishes and pockmarks on his face.
Backroom Deals: Inter-war Germany and the Soviet Union
Back in the Lenin-and-Trotsky days, the Soviets arranged a secret military agreement with the Weimar Republic of Germany. In a nutshell, the agreement called for the two to develop new weapons using Soviet facilities and German technical know-how discreetly. German troops were permitted to train secretly on Slavic soil, while Soviet officers and engineers were sent off to be educated in Teutonic military academies and factories.
It was a win-win situation: the Germans were allowed to keep up with current military trends in covert defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, while the Soviets benefited from the skills and expertise of the former industrial and military power. Although the agreement fell apart before Stalin took power, it laid the basis for further development and modernization of both armed forces. While Heinz Guderian was still formulating the Blitzkrieg doctrine of mechanized warfare, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was actively pitching a similar proposal in the form of the deep battle doctrine (and would ultimately end up being executed for his trouble).
Then in 1933, a little Austrian upstart named Adolf Hitler took centre stage. The Weimar Republic became Nazi Germany, German rearmament intensified, and the Treaty of Versailles was publicly made null and void as German jackboots trod into the Rhineland, Austria, and most of Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet leadership was not thrilled at this turn of events, as the Nazis' rhetoric made it clear that the two wouldn't be bosom buddies: Nazis hated Communism and Slavs, so Communist Slavs were an obvious enemy. However, the USSR didn't get involved as they were a bit preoccupied by border clashes with Imperial Japan near the Mongolian border. It was probably around this time that Stalin probably began to realize that his purges might have removed too many competent military officers from their posts, and that there were a lot more wolves outside than there were in his house. Much like every other country at the time, the USSR wasn't really all that ready for war.
Stalin decided that he didn't want to get involved in Europe, at least not until he had his own house in order. An alliance with France and Great Britain was unattractive because they had isolated the USSR by not inviting them to the talks with Hitler over his demands on Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Furthermore, in an imagined war between the USSR and Hitler, it was estimated the USSR would need about 300 divisions to safeguard their border with Germany, while the United Kingdom was prepared to offer only three or five divisions to the USSR if they were invaded. Additionally, USSR needed military access through Poland to deal with Germany, and Poles wisely didn't trust Russians and made France-Britain-Poland-USSR alliance impossible. This made Stalin more inclined to seek a diplomatic understanding with Nazi Germany. (To say nobody expected this to last long is a bit of an understatement.)
Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Stalin got his foreign minister Vyascheslav Molotov to sign a non-aggression pact with Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart. As per the terms of the pact, both countries would keep to their respective spheres of influence, which just happened to run adjacent through Poland. So, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Soviet Union followed up on the 17th by claiming the territory allotted to them. By that time, the Red Army managed to clean up the Japanese at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and so were free to turn their attention back to Europe in earnest.
The USSR proceeded to annex what would later become the states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, all of which were formerly part of the Russian Empire. These states would then become buffer states against a potential invasion from the West, whether from Germany or elsewhere. Part of their plan to expand their defensive buffer involved taking control of some Finnish territory. After being rebuffed in negotiations, the Soviet high command decided to take want they wanted by force. Thinking that conquering a small country with almost no tanks or aircraft to speak of would be easy, especially after their easy annexation of Poland, they quickly prepared for war with Finland, which was expected to last no more than two weeks.
It was a win-win situation: the Germans were allowed to keep up with current military trends in covert defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, while the Soviets benefited from the skills and expertise of the former industrial and military power. Although the agreement fell apart before Stalin took power, it laid the basis for further development and modernization of both armed forces. While Heinz Guderian was still formulating the Blitzkrieg doctrine of mechanized warfare, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was actively pitching a similar proposal in the form of the deep battle doctrine (and would ultimately end up being executed for his trouble).
Then in 1933, a little Austrian upstart named Adolf Hitler took centre stage. The Weimar Republic became Nazi Germany, German rearmament intensified, and the Treaty of Versailles was publicly made null and void as German jackboots trod into the Rhineland, Austria, and most of Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet leadership was not thrilled at this turn of events, as the Nazis' rhetoric made it clear that the two wouldn't be bosom buddies: Nazis hated Communism and Slavs, so Communist Slavs were an obvious enemy. However, the USSR didn't get involved as they were a bit preoccupied by border clashes with Imperial Japan near the Mongolian border. It was probably around this time that Stalin probably began to realize that his purges might have removed too many competent military officers from their posts, and that there were a lot more wolves outside than there were in his house. Much like every other country at the time, the USSR wasn't really all that ready for war.
Stalin decided that he didn't want to get involved in Europe, at least not until he had his own house in order. An alliance with France and Great Britain was unattractive because they had isolated the USSR by not inviting them to the talks with Hitler over his demands on Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Furthermore, in an imagined war between the USSR and Hitler, it was estimated the USSR would need about 300 divisions to safeguard their border with Germany, while the United Kingdom was prepared to offer only three or five divisions to the USSR if they were invaded. Additionally, USSR needed military access through Poland to deal with Germany, and Poles wisely didn't trust Russians and made France-Britain-Poland-USSR alliance impossible. This made Stalin more inclined to seek a diplomatic understanding with Nazi Germany. (To say nobody expected this to last long is a bit of an understatement.
)Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Stalin got his foreign minister Vyascheslav Molotov to sign a non-aggression pact with Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart. As per the terms of the pact, both countries would keep to their respective spheres of influence, which just happened to run adjacent through Poland. So, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Soviet Union followed up on the 17th by claiming the territory allotted to them. By that time, the Red Army managed to clean up the Japanese at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and so were free to turn their attention back to Europe in earnest.
The USSR proceeded to annex what would later become the states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova, all of which were formerly part of the Russian Empire. These states would then become buffer states against a potential invasion from the West, whether from Germany or elsewhere. Part of their plan to expand their defensive buffer involved taking control of some Finnish territory. After being rebuffed in negotiations, the Soviet high command decided to take want they wanted by force. Thinking that conquering a small country with almost no tanks or aircraft to speak of would be easy, especially after their easy annexation of Poland, they quickly prepared for war with Finland, which was expected to last no more than two weeks.
A Cold Shock: The Winter War
On 30 November 1939, the USSR declared war on Finland, citing a supposed Finnish attack on an NKVD border post which the NKVD itself orchestrated. What was supposed a relatively quick conflict ended up lasting over three months, with disproportionately large losses in manpower and materiel for the Red Army.
The Finnish army was skilled in the defence of its territory, yet that was not the reason why they lasted against a superior power. The main problem was that the Red Army was not ready to go to war with Finland and was badly weakened by its purges. It did not prepare sufficient supplies for a sustained winter campaign, nor did it gather enough data about the local climate and terrain. When combat operations commenced, there were serious issues with information gathering and processing, as reconnaissance of enemy positions was rarely conducted and intelligence officers often failed to relay information to commanders in a timely manner. Lack of communication plagued their forces, with infantry, artillery, and armour failing to coordinate with each other. Deployment was also an issue, with tanks employed in swampy and forested areas unsuited for their use; similarly, combat engineers were expended as regular infantry, with actual engineering tasks carried out by unskilled labour.
As such, Soviet forces often went into combat blind, with little support. On occasions where artillery support was secured, lack of observation and delays in processing orders meant that shells went off-target or otherwise allowed the Finns to relocate before they arrived.
After the Leningrad Military District's assaults on the Karelian Isthmus (the most direct path from Leningrad to Helsinki) faltered, the ineffectual General Kirill Meretskov was replaced by the utterly incompetent Kliment Voroshilov, Stalin's old Civil War buddy. Voroshilov decided that, rather than identifying or fixing any of the problems with organization and deployment, he'd simply have his forces flank the isthmus through 200km of dense and uncharted swamps and forests. This worked out about as well as one might expect, with his forces' isolated and overextended columns being cut to ribbons by Finnish hit-and-run raids. At this point even Stalin recognized that Voroshilov wasn't up to the task and allowed him to be replaced by Semyon Timoshenko—not an inspired commander, but a decent one who commanded the respect of his peers and Stalin.
Timoshenko worked with the General Staff to identify and began to correct some problems, ordering increased observation and reconnaissance while improving artillery–infantry coordination. This didn't solve the processing issue, but it allowed his forces to finally make some headway, even if the going was slow. Soviet forces were poised to clear the Karelian Isthmus and break into the open country when the USSR struck a peace deal with the Finnish government, wanting to avoid open hostilities with the Allies—the invasion had provoked such widespread international condemnation that Britain and France were poised to dispatch an expeditionary force to assist the Finns, which would have meant open war and an end to the USSR's foreign trade.
The Winter War worked out badly in that was a costly failure which diplomatically isolated the Soviet Union and put the faults of the post-purge Red Army on display for all the world to see. This forced Stalin to recognize that the Red Army had to be reformed. Perhaps more importantly, it affected assessments of the Red Army's capabilities by the Fremde Heeres Ost (Foreign Armies East), a military intelligence office tasked with gathering information on Germany's eastern opponents. To their detriment, the German Army would assume that the entire Red Army would be just as incompetent in mid-1941 as it was in the winter of 1939–40—so incompetent, in short, that it would be totally incapable of defending the USSR from a German invasion.
The Finnish army was skilled in the defence of its territory, yet that was not the reason why they lasted against a superior power. The main problem was that the Red Army was not ready to go to war with Finland and was badly weakened by its purges. It did not prepare sufficient supplies for a sustained winter campaign, nor did it gather enough data about the local climate and terrain. When combat operations commenced, there were serious issues with information gathering and processing, as reconnaissance of enemy positions was rarely conducted and intelligence officers often failed to relay information to commanders in a timely manner. Lack of communication plagued their forces, with infantry, artillery, and armour failing to coordinate with each other. Deployment was also an issue, with tanks employed in swampy and forested areas unsuited for their use; similarly, combat engineers were expended as regular infantry, with actual engineering tasks carried out by unskilled labour.
As such, Soviet forces often went into combat blind, with little support. On occasions where artillery support was secured, lack of observation and delays in processing orders meant that shells went off-target or otherwise allowed the Finns to relocate before they arrived.
After the Leningrad Military District's assaults on the Karelian Isthmus (the most direct path from Leningrad to Helsinki) faltered, the ineffectual General Kirill Meretskov was replaced by the utterly incompetent Kliment Voroshilov, Stalin's old Civil War buddy. Voroshilov decided that, rather than identifying or fixing any of the problems with organization and deployment, he'd simply have his forces flank the isthmus through 200km of dense and uncharted swamps and forests. This worked out about as well as one might expect, with his forces' isolated and overextended columns being cut to ribbons by Finnish hit-and-run raids. At this point even Stalin recognized that Voroshilov wasn't up to the task and allowed him to be replaced by Semyon Timoshenko—not an inspired commander, but a decent one who commanded the respect of his peers and Stalin.
Timoshenko worked with the General Staff to identify and began to correct some problems, ordering increased observation and reconnaissance while improving artillery–infantry coordination. This didn't solve the processing issue, but it allowed his forces to finally make some headway, even if the going was slow. Soviet forces were poised to clear the Karelian Isthmus and break into the open country when the USSR struck a peace deal with the Finnish government, wanting to avoid open hostilities with the Allies—the invasion had provoked such widespread international condemnation that Britain and France were poised to dispatch an expeditionary force to assist the Finns, which would have meant open war and an end to the USSR's foreign trade.
The Winter War worked out badly in that was a costly failure which diplomatically isolated the Soviet Union and put the faults of the post-purge Red Army on display for all the world to see. This forced Stalin to recognize that the Red Army had to be reformed. Perhaps more importantly, it affected assessments of the Red Army's capabilities by the Fremde Heeres Ost (Foreign Armies East), a military intelligence office tasked with gathering information on Germany's eastern opponents. To their detriment, the German Army would assume that the entire Red Army would be just as incompetent in mid-1941 as it was in the winter of 1939–40—so incompetent, in short, that it would be totally incapable of defending the USSR from a German invasion.
For the Rodina! The Great Patriotic War, Part One
One of the few historical equivalents to the USA's Manifest Destiny, or Great Britain's proclamation of dominion over an entire continent (Australia), was 19th–20th-century Germany's Drang Nach Osten (lit. "Drive to the East").
To German nationalist intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, eastern Europe was fated to be the birthplace of Greater Germany, just as the western parts of North America had been fated to be annexed by the USA. The ultimate destiny of the Slavic–Mongoloid–Caucasian people who lived in Germany's new territories was to become as the First Nations of Canada, the Iroquois of the USA's Midwest, or the Eora around Sydney: they must be evicted to make room for a "real" civilisation. To Rosenberg and his fellows, the only difference between Anglo and Germanic ethnic cleansing and settlement was the time factor: if Germany was to catch up with the English-speaking peoples, then she would have to accomplish a similar amount of killing and colonization in a much shorter timespan. Germany under the Kaiser had been wrong to attempt to colonize overseas, they had argued—Germany's colonies had only ever been mere scraps, economically dubious and geographically disparate and militarily vulnerable to Anglo–American sea power. Germany was a land power, they argued, and her destiny lay to the east.
On 22 June 1941, Germany (population 60 million) embarked on a Grand Crusade to interbreed with up to 30 million, enslave at least 90 million, and kill at least 40 million people. This would give Germany the raw materials and workforce she needed to resist the Anglo-Americans (combined population c. 200 million) in the short term and the territory she would need to outbreed them in the long term. It would also destroy an Asiatic power which condemned racism and nationalism, and a Judaic power which was helping the scions of Zion control the world from the shadows. In short, declaring war upon the Soviet Union met so many policy goals that Germany could never have resisted attempting if there was the slightest chance of victory. Hitler did not declare war in July 1940 because the Army believed that German supply and ammunition stockpiles in Poland were too small for them to make any headway. Ironically, Germany had to buy enough aviation fuel and rubber and other rare materials from the Soviet Union over the following 10 months for her to be capable of waging actual war upon the Soviet Union in May 1941. Whereupon in May 1941, a late spring thaw/melt and persistent showers forced the war to be pushed back until June, as they could make no headway through the oceans of mud.
Throughout this period Stalin mistakenly believed that the Nazis had a realistic appraisal of their odds in a war against the Soviet Union (optimistically poor, pessimistically suicidal). As we now know, Stalin was wrong for a few reasons. First, the true strength of the Soviet Union was unknown by all. It was clear that at least one Front of the Red Army and one of its senior commanders (Leningrad, Voroshilov) were incompetent, but on the other hand another Front and another senior commander (Far East, Zhukov) were clearly competent. It was also clear that the Soviet Union had at least an equivalent population and industrial strength to Imperial Russia, but it wasn't clear how much of it they could use. Second and most importantly, the German Army and military intelligence lied to Hitler about the chances of victory in a Soviet–German War.note They told Hitler that a quick and easy victory was assured, when they themselves knew that there were too many unknown factors for the outcome to be anything but uncertain.
Stalin's assumption that the Nazis knew the breaks, or at least wouldn't want to gamble on their chances, underpinned the USSR's rearmament and military reforms following the Winter War. These expanded the army and were designed to make its units capable of fighting a shooting war after 1942. Until then, it was embroiled in an extensive and highly disruptive reorganisation and retraining process, and its units were incapable of effective combat. Thus, despite extensive manpower mobilization in the western military districts, Soviet forces were ill-prepared for war in June 1941. Many tanks and planes lacked fuel and were still in storage or required extensive maintenance and unavailable spare parts. Most mobile units (armour, mechanised and motorised infantry) lacked tank-recovery vehicles and repair units and had only part of their truck transport and supply pools. Most frontier raions were awaiting adequate numbers of machine guns and artillery (to be delivered in 1942). And finally, most frontier commanders at all levels—bar those of the Southern/Bessarabian Military District—believed that even attempting basic tactical or operational defensive planning or preparations would show a lack of faith in their forces' ability to launch the planned counter-offensive into Poland.
Stalin received a great deal of information both indicating that the Germans would and would not launch an invasion. On the "For" side:
To German nationalist intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, eastern Europe was fated to be the birthplace of Greater Germany, just as the western parts of North America had been fated to be annexed by the USA. The ultimate destiny of the Slavic–Mongoloid–Caucasian people who lived in Germany's new territories was to become as the First Nations of Canada, the Iroquois of the USA's Midwest, or the Eora around Sydney: they must be evicted to make room for a "real" civilisation. To Rosenberg and his fellows, the only difference between Anglo and Germanic ethnic cleansing and settlement was the time factor: if Germany was to catch up with the English-speaking peoples, then she would have to accomplish a similar amount of killing and colonization in a much shorter timespan. Germany under the Kaiser had been wrong to attempt to colonize overseas, they had argued—Germany's colonies had only ever been mere scraps, economically dubious and geographically disparate and militarily vulnerable to Anglo–American sea power. Germany was a land power, they argued, and her destiny lay to the east.
On 22 June 1941, Germany (population 60 million) embarked on a Grand Crusade to interbreed with up to 30 million, enslave at least 90 million, and kill at least 40 million people. This would give Germany the raw materials and workforce she needed to resist the Anglo-Americans (combined population c. 200 million) in the short term and the territory she would need to outbreed them in the long term. It would also destroy an Asiatic power which condemned racism and nationalism, and a Judaic power which was helping the scions of Zion control the world from the shadows. In short, declaring war upon the Soviet Union met so many policy goals that Germany could never have resisted attempting if there was the slightest chance of victory. Hitler did not declare war in July 1940 because the Army believed that German supply and ammunition stockpiles in Poland were too small for them to make any headway. Ironically, Germany had to buy enough aviation fuel and rubber and other rare materials from the Soviet Union over the following 10 months for her to be capable of waging actual war upon the Soviet Union in May 1941. Whereupon in May 1941, a late spring thaw/melt and persistent showers forced the war to be pushed back until June, as they could make no headway through the oceans of mud.
Throughout this period Stalin mistakenly believed that the Nazis had a realistic appraisal of their odds in a war against the Soviet Union (optimistically poor, pessimistically suicidal). As we now know, Stalin was wrong for a few reasons. First, the true strength of the Soviet Union was unknown by all. It was clear that at least one Front of the Red Army and one of its senior commanders (Leningrad, Voroshilov) were incompetent, but on the other hand another Front and another senior commander (Far East, Zhukov) were clearly competent. It was also clear that the Soviet Union had at least an equivalent population and industrial strength to Imperial Russia, but it wasn't clear how much of it they could use. Second and most importantly, the German Army and military intelligence lied to Hitler about the chances of victory in a Soviet–German War.note They told Hitler that a quick and easy victory was assured, when they themselves knew that there were too many unknown factors for the outcome to be anything but uncertain.
Stalin's assumption that the Nazis knew the breaks, or at least wouldn't want to gamble on their chances, underpinned the USSR's rearmament and military reforms following the Winter War. These expanded the army and were designed to make its units capable of fighting a shooting war after 1942. Until then, it was embroiled in an extensive and highly disruptive reorganisation and retraining process, and its units were incapable of effective combat. Thus, despite extensive manpower mobilization in the western military districts, Soviet forces were ill-prepared for war in June 1941. Many tanks and planes lacked fuel and were still in storage or required extensive maintenance and unavailable spare parts. Most mobile units (armour, mechanised and motorised infantry) lacked tank-recovery vehicles and repair units and had only part of their truck transport and supply pools. Most frontier raions were awaiting adequate numbers of machine guns and artillery (to be delivered in 1942). And finally, most frontier commanders at all levels—bar those of the Southern/Bessarabian Military District—believed that even attempting basic tactical or operational defensive planning or preparations would show a lack of faith in their forces' ability to launch the planned counter-offensive into Poland.
Stalin received a great deal of information both indicating that the Germans would and would not launch an invasion. On the "For" side:
- A source on the Imperial Japanese Army (Richard Sorge) indicated that Japan had been approached about the possibility of a German–Japanese declaration of war upon the Soviet Union, though the Japanese had refused.
- Sources within the Luftwaffe (Dora Spy Ring) passed on a strategic overview of its general plan for Operation Barbarossa, which was to commence on 15 May 1941.
- Winston Churchill had sent some information on some of the Germans' troops deployments to Poland together with a note saying that the Soviets might find this "interesting".note
On the "Against" side:
- A source within the Luftwaffe's Four-Year Plan Organisation (Dora again) for armaments indicated that German industrial production was focused on expanding U-boot and Medium Bomber production. Small-arms and artillery production, and ammunition production, were being reduced.
- The same source indicated some hawkishness on the part of the Army, especially the Luftwaffe, but indicated that the Navy and Hitler himself were cautious about war within the Soviet Union.
- Again, Dora confirmed that the Luftwaffe and German industry were still dependent upon purchases from the Soviet Union.
- Signals and human intelligence (i.e., defectors and leaks in German-allied countries) indicated that German forces were massing on the Soviet-German border and conducting reconnaissance overflights of Soviet territory, but the head of military intelligence (Ivan Golikov) opined that these were for a defensive counter-offensive if the Soviets attacked first—or perhaps to attack first if it appeared that the Soviets were about to attack.
- Operation Barbarossa did not occur on 15 May.
- Winston Churchill clearly hated both the Stalinist and Hitlerist regimes and at least wanted them to cease trading if not wipe one another out.
As You Know, the Army had told Hitler that the Soviet–German War would be over so quickly and easily that none of the "Against" evidence available to Stalin meant anything. Insufficient Army production, Luftwaffe and industrial dependency upon Soviet imports, Ivan Golikov's opinion, the postponing of the Barbarossa start-date, Churchill's hatred of Nazism and Communism—none of it mattered.
On 22 June 1941, the Axis threat was proven in dramatic style when three and a half million soldiers went into action in "Operation Barbarossa". Within weeks, the frontier military districts were overwhelmed and millions of Soviet soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. As they entered the western USSR, the locals, sick of Soviet oppression, welcomed them with open arms. The Nazis responded by taking their food and shelter, or with bullets, or enslaved them to work in mines or factories. By 9 July Riga, Pskov, and Minsk had all been captured. But Soviet resistance was already stiffening. In the south a series of failed and uncoordinated counterattacks still managed to stall the Germans. In the center, despite losing millions more to encirclement, the Soviets successfully pinned German forces down in a month’s worth of brutal fighting around Smolensk. Hitler decided that Moscow could not be taken immediately; instead, the grain and oil of the Ukraine would be seized first and the bulging Soviet salient around Kiev eliminated. The resulting campaign led to millions more killed or captured on the Soviet side but bought some time for the Red Army to reorganize.
The "behind the Urals" building came into handy here, since the USSR could continue with weapons production out of the range of the Luftwaffe, while Germany was having to deal with the USAAF and RAF. The Soviets also evacuated a great deal of their industrial base from European Russia when the Germans invaded. It went quite well and the new relocated industrial plants were soon churning out lots of material for the Soviet war effort; the fact that they'd been practicing for just this eventuality since the 1920s and were well-prepared when the time came was important. That's the thing about the Soviets; one thing they were good at was organizing massive physical movements of things.note Moreover, Stalin finally started replacing his incompetent cronies with officers whom he had previously condemned to the gulag. He also started listening to intelligence reports from the British and his own agencies, which allowed the military leadership to have some idea of what the Germans and their allies were planning. Richard Sorge's report that the Germans' Japanese allies would not attack the Soviet Union was particularly crucial: this allowed for the redeployment of thousands of combat-tested veterans and dozens of armoured units to spearhead an upcoming counterattack.
The Battles of Moscow, Rostov, and Tikhvin in the center, south, and north respectively resulted in crippling German defeat. The follow-up Soviet counteroffensives tore apart the front and left the Wehrmacht in disarray. But due to a variety of factors, the Wehrmacht was not defeated in the winter of 1941–1942 and survived, if barely, to fight another day. The Soviet Winter Counteroffensive, despite many initial successes, failed. Stavka, the Soviet high command, refused to accept this and continued to batter German defenses along a broad front in early 1942. These offensives drained German manpower but failed to achieve decisive results. Hitler, believing that the war could be ended by the seizure of oil fields in the Caucasus, ordered the south reinforced at the expense of the north and center, in preparation for a new summer offensive. This alone represented how quickly the Wehrmacht had declined; it could only launch an offensive on one front rather than three as in 1941. Stalin, on the other hand, believed at offensive would again be launched at Moscow and reinforced the center at the expense of other fronts. Meanwhile, he only worsened the situation by launching a series of offensives at Kerch, Kharkov, and Lyuban, all of which ended in disaster.
Drive Them Out! The Great Patriotic War, Part Two
The initial German advance was swift, reaching Voronezh and Rostov within a few weeks. Contrary to official Russian accounts the southern armies were annihilated in the fighting and failed to make an organized retreat. With these initial victories Army Group South divided itself into two forces; one would swing south of the Don to seize the oil fields, while the other would advance into the bend of the Don, to Stalingrad. In the end the Wehrmacht never had the strength or supplies to take either objective. Trying to take both only compounded the problem. The advance into the Don resulted in a massive meeting engagement as the Red Army's 5th, 4th, and 1st tank armies counterattacked. The ensuing battle damaged the 6th Army and left in understrength even before its final push. By the time 6th and 4th Panzer Armies reached Stalingrad they were already exhausted and unprepared for the brutal urban war that followed. Leaving most of its strength in the north to fend off Soviet counterattacks, 6th Army pushed into the city in a series of short leaps and bounds, with 4th Panzer Army assisting in the southern districts of the city. The Soviet high command fed Chuikov, the commander of the city's defense, just enough men, food, and ammunition to allow them to continue fighting. At the same time, it launched diversionary attacks north of the city to test and weaken the 6th Army. By mid-November, despite seizing much of the city, the Germans were exhausted and unprepared for a massive Soviet counteroffensive.
But battles were happening beyond Stalingrad as well. In the center Soviet and German forces struggled for months over the Rzhev salient. In the Caucasus German attempts to seize the oil fields were held back, due to Soviet resistance and poor German logistics. Around Voronezh constant Soviet counterattacks hammered the German 2nd Army. By the time Stalingrad reached its climax German forces across the front were already weak, not even close to ready for the Red Army's main blows. Stavka's plan for the second winter counteroffensive had two parts. The first was Operation Uranus, a massive attack which would encircle most of 6th Army around Stalingrad and set the stage for a series of follow-up attacks along the Don. The second was Operation Mars, an attack designed to collapse the Rzhev salient, destroy the German 9th Army, and then Army Group Center. The first attack was even more successful than originally planned. The second failed utterly, with half a million losses. But only one victory was necessary.
Operation Uranus encircled the 6th Army inside the Stalingrad region, tearing apart the German southern front. Counterattacks were easily halted, and Stavka began to expand its objectives to not only include the reduction of the 6th Army, but the utter annihilation of all German forces in southern Russia. But, as in the First Winter Counteroffensive, it overestimated the strength and relative skill of Soviet forces. Despite mauling several more German armies, they failed to achieve encirclements on the same scale as the Stalingrad Offensive and by March were rapidly losing momentum. Capitalizing on overextended Soviet forces, the Germans launched a massive counteroffensive which thwarted Soviet plans to collapse the entire front line and earned them a short respite.
Emphasis on 'short'; it wouldn't be long before the two sides fought one last massive engagement in the salient created by the ebb and flow of war: the 'Belorussian Balcony'. Determined to close it, the Germans gathered their strength in preparation for what they called Operation Citadel. Thus, the Battle of Kursk—the battle with the most armoured vehicles ever employed—was fought. A far cry from the brilliant strategic manoeuvres of the past, it was hugely wasteful: the Germans failed to achieve surprise and ended up smashing their forces against the heavily layered Soviet defences, consisting of minefields and fortifications up to 300 kilometres deep, supported by artillery, anti-tank guns, and considerable reserve forces. Although the Germans inflicted far greater losses on Soviet forces, the already-depleted Wehrmacht had sustained irreplaceable casualties and lost too much of its best equipment in the offensive.
It was the Wehrmacht's last gasp—all it could really do from then on was try to slow down the Soviets as it retreated from Russia and back to the Third Reich. As the Soviet offensives began in mid-1943, the Germans found that at first they could at least manage organized retreats even if they couldn't outright stop the Russians. But as the Germans grew progressively weaker and the Soviets progressively stronger, the ability to even retreat successfully fell away from the Wehrmacht. By the summer of 1944, the situation was completely inverted from that of 1941: the Germans who would lose multiple armies to each massive Soviet blow.
The Soviets liberated Auschwitz and captured Berlin. It also invaded Manchuria in the closing days of the Pacific War, occupying half of Korea, which became North Korea and later provided a base for Mao Zedong.
The Great Patriotic War is possibly the single bloodiest conflict in human history with about 5 million military deaths on the Axis side; 10.9 million military and 15,7 million civilian deaths on the Soviet side. That, as well as the utter devastation of much of the European USSR, was a major driving force in Soviet foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Belarus, for example, lost a quarter of its entire population in the fighting. If there is one thing to take away from the Great Patriotic War, it is: "Nobody is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."
The war can be divided into three periods based on the strategic situation: the first extending from 22 June – 18 November 1941, the second until December 1943, and the third until the end of the war in May 1945. In the first period the Wehrmacht held the strategic initiative. In the second the Red Army began to seize the initiative but continued to suffer numerous setbacks. In the third period the Red Army's advances were constant, interrupted only by short pauses to replenish men and material, and its victory assured.
But battles were happening beyond Stalingrad as well. In the center Soviet and German forces struggled for months over the Rzhev salient. In the Caucasus German attempts to seize the oil fields were held back, due to Soviet resistance and poor German logistics. Around Voronezh constant Soviet counterattacks hammered the German 2nd Army. By the time Stalingrad reached its climax German forces across the front were already weak, not even close to ready for the Red Army's main blows. Stavka's plan for the second winter counteroffensive had two parts. The first was Operation Uranus, a massive attack which would encircle most of 6th Army around Stalingrad and set the stage for a series of follow-up attacks along the Don. The second was Operation Mars, an attack designed to collapse the Rzhev salient, destroy the German 9th Army, and then Army Group Center. The first attack was even more successful than originally planned. The second failed utterly, with half a million losses. But only one victory was necessary.
Operation Uranus encircled the 6th Army inside the Stalingrad region, tearing apart the German southern front. Counterattacks were easily halted, and Stavka began to expand its objectives to not only include the reduction of the 6th Army, but the utter annihilation of all German forces in southern Russia. But, as in the First Winter Counteroffensive, it overestimated the strength and relative skill of Soviet forces. Despite mauling several more German armies, they failed to achieve encirclements on the same scale as the Stalingrad Offensive and by March were rapidly losing momentum. Capitalizing on overextended Soviet forces, the Germans launched a massive counteroffensive which thwarted Soviet plans to collapse the entire front line and earned them a short respite.
Emphasis on 'short'; it wouldn't be long before the two sides fought one last massive engagement in the salient created by the ebb and flow of war: the 'Belorussian Balcony'. Determined to close it, the Germans gathered their strength in preparation for what they called Operation Citadel. Thus, the Battle of Kursk—the battle with the most armoured vehicles ever employed—was fought. A far cry from the brilliant strategic manoeuvres of the past, it was hugely wasteful: the Germans failed to achieve surprise and ended up smashing their forces against the heavily layered Soviet defences, consisting of minefields and fortifications up to 300 kilometres deep, supported by artillery, anti-tank guns, and considerable reserve forces. Although the Germans inflicted far greater losses on Soviet forces, the already-depleted Wehrmacht had sustained irreplaceable casualties and lost too much of its best equipment in the offensive.
It was the Wehrmacht's last gasp—all it could really do from then on was try to slow down the Soviets as it retreated from Russia and back to the Third Reich. As the Soviet offensives began in mid-1943, the Germans found that at first they could at least manage organized retreats even if they couldn't outright stop the Russians. But as the Germans grew progressively weaker and the Soviets progressively stronger, the ability to even retreat successfully fell away from the Wehrmacht. By the summer of 1944, the situation was completely inverted from that of 1941: the Germans who would lose multiple armies to each massive Soviet blow.
The Soviets liberated Auschwitz and captured Berlin. It also invaded Manchuria in the closing days of the Pacific War, occupying half of Korea, which became North Korea and later provided a base for Mao Zedong.
The Great Patriotic War is possibly the single bloodiest conflict in human history with about 5 million military deaths on the Axis side; 10.9 million military and 15,7 million civilian deaths on the Soviet side. That, as well as the utter devastation of much of the European USSR, was a major driving force in Soviet foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Belarus, for example, lost a quarter of its entire population in the fighting. If there is one thing to take away from the Great Patriotic War, it is: "Nobody is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."
The war can be divided into three periods based on the strategic situation: the first extending from 22 June – 18 November 1941, the second until December 1943, and the third until the end of the war in May 1945. In the first period the Wehrmacht held the strategic initiative. In the second the Red Army began to seize the initiative but continued to suffer numerous setbacks. In the third period the Red Army's advances were constant, interrupted only by short pauses to replenish men and material, and its victory assured.
More Paranoia: Josef Stalin 1945– 53
After the war, a whole bunch of Cossacks (usually estimated as 45,000–50,000), nearly all pro-Nazi, although that still doesn't justify it, were forcibly repatriated to the USSR, where most ended up dead in The Gulag. This process was aided by the British and the Americans, who lied to them about granting them asylum and brought them into the waiting arms of the Russians. This became the Big Bad's motivating factor of revenge in GoldenEye.
The Soviets facilitated their economic recovery and general repair by looting the territories they had occupied; in many cases, much of the industrial stuff that had come into their possession, a real windfall, were put on railroad cars and shipped east. They justified this policy with the argument that they were taking stuff from countries which had supported the Nazis—technically true, but then again the Nazis hadn't exactly given those countries much choice. Anyway, the Soviet policy worked, to some extent. They also got a lot of reparations; some were a little on the strange side. For example, they received some elevators from the Germans, which were used in some Stalinist apartment complexes in Moscow.
Certainly, Nazi Germany is correctly infamous for carrying out massacres and forced deportations of undesirables in its captured territories, although it's worth noting that the USSR also had more than a few such skeletons in its closet.
Some time after the Soviets invaded Poland, about 22,000 Polish prisoners from both military and civilian backgrounds disappeared in Russian hands. In 1943, local rumours of a massacre in the Katyn Forest eventually led the Nazis to dig up the remains as leverage to drive the Allies apart. The Soviets then retorted that it was done by the Nazis after the latter had overrun the territory during Operation Barbarossa. Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of some Soviet-era archives that the Russian government admitted responsibility for the deed and added that many other Polish victims were killed and buried in mass graves at other locations as well.
After the tide of war turned and the Germans were gradually forced out of Eastern Europe, the Soviets started cracking down on potential political opposition in their captured territories and put their own hand-picked leaders in charge. Atrocities among the civilian population intensified once Soviet forces entered German territory, although such occurrences were understandably the product of war and revenge for German incivilities, and tapered off once some sort of order got established.
A lot of other people were kicked out of the new borders of Central and Eastern Europe or were forcibly brought back. This particularly applied to the Soviet POWs and civilians forced to work for the Nazis. During the war, the Nazis put them in the death camps, where they weren't shot on the spot. Nazis killed 57% of Soviet POWs, or 3.3 million people. Auschwitz II (the one with the infamous railway arch) was first built to exterminate 100,000 Soviet prisoners. You'd have thought that after they'd been through the hell on earth that was The Holocaust, the USSR would have at least treated them decently. Instead, the Soviets accused most of them of collaboration and sent about 42% (some 2 million) to The Gulag. The German POWs ended up in forced labour camps, where many of them died. The last prisoners were not released until 1955.
Stalin proceeded to impose Soviet dominance over Central Europe and play a major part in the start of the Cold War.
At home, the repression continued, as did the Cult of Personality, due to Stalin being perceived as the man who saved Russia. With the (again fabricated) "Doctors' Plot", Jewish doctors were alleged to be trying to poison the Soviet leadership. Things turned purgy, anti-Semitic and ugly. Before things could turn into another mass party purge (or even a full-blown pogrom against Jews), Stalin died. In the early morning hours, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and rendered him unable to speak, let alone get out of bed. Stalin's own strict orders to his guards not to disturb him led to him being denied medical treatment for over 12 hours before someone decided to check up on him.
The Soviets facilitated their economic recovery and general repair by looting the territories they had occupied; in many cases, much of the industrial stuff that had come into their possession, a real windfall, were put on railroad cars and shipped east. They justified this policy with the argument that they were taking stuff from countries which had supported the Nazis—technically true, but then again the Nazis hadn't exactly given those countries much choice. Anyway, the Soviet policy worked, to some extent. They also got a lot of reparations; some were a little on the strange side. For example, they received some elevators from the Germans, which were used in some Stalinist apartment complexes in Moscow.
Certainly, Nazi Germany is correctly infamous for carrying out massacres and forced deportations of undesirables in its captured territories, although it's worth noting that the USSR also had more than a few such skeletons in its closet.
Some time after the Soviets invaded Poland, about 22,000 Polish prisoners from both military and civilian backgrounds disappeared in Russian hands. In 1943, local rumours of a massacre in the Katyn Forest eventually led the Nazis to dig up the remains as leverage to drive the Allies apart. The Soviets then retorted that it was done by the Nazis after the latter had overrun the territory during Operation Barbarossa. Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of some Soviet-era archives that the Russian government admitted responsibility for the deed and added that many other Polish victims were killed and buried in mass graves at other locations as well.
After the tide of war turned and the Germans were gradually forced out of Eastern Europe, the Soviets started cracking down on potential political opposition in their captured territories and put their own hand-picked leaders in charge. Atrocities among the civilian population intensified once Soviet forces entered German territory, although such occurrences were understandably the product of war and revenge for German incivilities, and tapered off once some sort of order got established.
A lot of other people were kicked out of the new borders of Central and Eastern Europe or were forcibly brought back. This particularly applied to the Soviet POWs and civilians forced to work for the Nazis. During the war, the Nazis put them in the death camps, where they weren't shot on the spot. Nazis killed 57% of Soviet POWs, or 3.3 million people. Auschwitz II (the one with the infamous railway arch) was first built to exterminate 100,000 Soviet prisoners. You'd have thought that after they'd been through the hell on earth that was The Holocaust, the USSR would have at least treated them decently. Instead, the Soviets accused most of them of collaboration and sent about 42% (some 2 million) to The Gulag. The German POWs ended up in forced labour camps, where many of them died. The last prisoners were not released until 1955.
Stalin proceeded to impose Soviet dominance over Central Europe and play a major part in the start of the Cold War.
At home, the repression continued, as did the Cult of Personality, due to Stalin being perceived as the man who saved Russia. With the (again fabricated) "Doctors' Plot", Jewish doctors were alleged to be trying to poison the Soviet leadership. Things turned purgy, anti-Semitic and ugly. Before things could turn into another mass party purge (or even a full-blown pogrom against Jews), Stalin died. In the early morning hours, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and rendered him unable to speak, let alone get out of bed. Stalin's own strict orders to his guards not to disturb him led to him being denied medical treatment for over 12 hours before someone decided to check up on him.
Getting Shoe Slapped: Nikita Khrushchev
A collection of people were now running the Soviet Union, with power being split between premier Georgy Malenkov and party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (and Georgy Zhukov with whom the latter had a solid relationship; Zhukov had been shuffled away on a shitty assignment in the Urals by Stalin, as gratitude for his genius leadership in the Great War, until Khrushchev called him back to Moscow). One of the first things they did was to stop the purges, barring Beria, who was purged because he had a history of trying to topple Zhukov and was a major threat to the new regime. Beria had formerly been the head of the NKVD, and personally orchestrated the Katyn Massacre, and various extensive purges. He was also publicly known to be a sexual predator with a psychopathic track record; he hunted the streets for young women, ordering his bodyguards to abduct them to his office where he would use and threat them. He also flattered Stalin a lot. Ironically, it was Beria who first proposed mass amnesty, rehabilitation, and a review of some cases like Doctors' Plot. But his reputation was too strong, and besides, he was very much in the way of Malenkov and Khrushchev.
They also sent in the tanks to East Germany in 1953, when German workers struck for better working conditions, and to rectify the many broken promises of the USSR. Something similar occurred in Hungary in 1956. More on that below.
There was a power struggle during the two years following Stalin's death. Despite nominally being the overall leader of the country during this period, Malenkov commanded very little respect from his peers—especially after the execution of his main ally, Beria—leading to his responsibilities slowly being stripped away, before he was forced to resign altogether in early 1955, and Khrushchev (we'll just call him "Nikita" from now on) ended up in charge. One of the first things he did surprised the world.
It was 25 February 1956. The CPSU was meeting for its 20th Congress in a closed session. The "cult of personality" was being denounced, a veiled reference to Stalin. Then Nikita delivered what is known as "The Secret Speech". Four hours long, Stalin and his crimes were denounced by name. The speech apparently caused heart attacks and even suicides. Leaked to the Western press (possibly deliberately), the whole world got an idea of the extent of the brutality of the Stalinist regime.
Things were somewhat liberalised and in 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched. That year, Nikita started getting shoe slapped.
However, Khrushchev had no intention of giving up his power so easily. He managed to persuade his rivals to undertake another vote at the Central Committee, which they were sure would just be a repeat of the first. What they didn't see coming was Khrushchev taking advantage of his relationship with Zhukov and the chairman of the KGB Serov, who flew military planes to the part of the Central Committee that was loyal to Khrushchev, and after a long debate, most of the Central Committee Presidium was called an anti-party group and accused of splitting.
Thus, Khrushchev remained in power, and quickly made sure that Molotov, Malenkov, and their co-conspirators were Reassigned to Antarctica. Thereafter, he also took over the role of premier on the implied reasoning that if the Anti-Party Group were happy for Bulganin to be both First Secretary and premier, naturally nobody should have any problem with him holding the same two positions. Khrushchev's handling of the incident solidified his position but also received a distinctly mixed reaction over his use of the military to resolve the situation, especially after he rewarded Zhukov for his loyalty by dismissing him from the government.
On 12 October, the debate was on a Soviet motion attacking colonialism. Lorenzo Sumulong, the Philippines' delegate, accused the USSR of double standards because of its domination of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev interrupted the speech with a point of order and denounced Sumulong as a toady of the United States. Accounts are conflicted regarding the actual use of the shoe. The 'traditional' source is that Khrushchev took off his shoe and banged it on his desk. Another source is that the shoes he was wearing were new and he had taken one off for comfort which he later banged on the table. Another source states his shoe had accidentally been removed when his foot popped out of it and the shoe was returned to him later, which is why it was on his desk. Some records indicate he did not bang his shoe on his desk at all but instead banged his fist on the desk so hard someone thought he was using his shoe which was already on the desk, and he may have mimed banging it without actually doing it. At any rate, there is no photograph or video of this incident, eyewitness reports are varied at best, and the fact that there were photographers who were watching the scene seem to indicate he did not actually use the shoe to bang his desk. (If you have seen a photo of Khrushchev holding a shoe, it is a popular fake.)
("We will bury you" was at another time and is somewhat ambiguous, in both languages, since Nikita said it in Russian, as to how and when the capitalists were supposed to die; the full transcript reveals he meant that the Soviet Union would simply outlive rotting capitalist states.)
Other agricultural and administrative reforms did very little. On the bright side, Khruschev started a Union-wide housing project, with the aim of providing every family in USSR with an apartment free of charge. He roughly did. Yes, to the extent that all the old, shaggy five-storey apartment buildings are unanimously called "khruschoba", a portmanteau of "Khrushchev" and trushchoba ("Khrushchev's slum"). But we should not forget that these buildings are more than 60 years old, and they were designed to be demolished and houses of improved layout built in their place. And initially, Khrushchev's buildings were almost paradisiacal conditions, since the five-story apartment building was built in just a few weeks. Considering that by the early 50s millions of people lived in barracks, basements, or apartments with stove heating and wooden coverings, yes, Khrushchev houses with all the amenities, albeit small areas of the apartments themselves, were a pretty good offer. And, even though they all came out of the national budget, the people did not pay a kopeck for them. The administrative reforms in the industrial and agricultural field were full of holes and excess bravado that led to numerous catastrophes, but the industry itself grew enormously.
Let's not forget the other ecological disasters/problems the USSR suffered: ever hear of the Aral Sea? Well, in 1960, by all accounts it was quite lovely and the second-largest big inland sea-thing in the world. The Soviets wanted to turn Central Asia into some kind of cotton nexus (see above) and cotton needs lots of irrigation … anyway, they ended up diverting most of the water flowing into the Aral Sea for irrigation purposes. This didn't even work too well; a lot of these irrigation works were of poor quality. There was a lot of leakage and erosion. Inadequate drainage damaged the soil. The Soviets even knew, to some extent, the fact that they were going to get rid of the Aral Sea, but they thought it was justified; the Aral Sea was "nature's folly" and would evaporate anyway, so they might as well do some of nature's work. This had predictable consequences: dropping water levels, a lot of formerly coastal towns now kilometers away from the water … a real ecological disaster. Like, all that newly exposed lakebed … not much in the way of plants to anchor the soil or anything. So, dust-bowl type problems … that kind of thing.
Preceding Chernobyl, there was the Mayak disaster: an accident at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in 1957. Dreary and nasty, but funny in a sick way. Let's just say that if you encounter a sign that tells you to roll up your windows while driving around Russia, you'd better do what it says.
Or how about Dzerzhinsk? Yes, named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and it still has that name. The one in Russia, of course, not the one in Poland or wherever. It was a center of the Soviet chemical industry and one of the Closed Cities, because a lot of chemical weapons-related work was done there. Today, it's one of the most badly polluted cities in the world and so toxic and nasty, it's perversely funny to read about. And unlike many badly polluted, toxic places, Dzerzhinsk is just as nasty as it looks. Much of the water there is contaminated with millions of times the maximum acceptable levels of various toxins, and there are big retention ponds full of toxic sludge.
At first. Khrushchev was open to negotiation and was willing to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary. He was at least marginally sympathetic to the revolutionaries as he himself was an ambitious reformer, but he and Soviet leadership at large was terrified by populism and direct action, preferring a "top-down", state-guided approach to reform. However, Khrushchev leaned towards military intervention at the behest of Yuri Andropov, the Ambassador to Hungary at the time and a future leader of the USSR. He was also concerned that bourgeois interests could use democracy to destroy socialism in Hungary, and when Nagy withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, the Hungarian Revolution became a matter of national security in the eyes of Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. As such, the decision was made to roll in the tanks.
The brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution had diplomatic ramifications for Khrushchev. When Stalin died in 1953, internal US State Department memos expressed optimism that the new leaders of the Soviet Union were more reasonable and less belligerent, and thus they could be worked with to promote better Soviet–American relations. Hungary changed that, with the State Department now convinced that Soviet foreign policy had stayed in rough stasis from Stalin's time, crushing the last great hope for normalized Soviet–American relations.
In 1964, the other Commies had had enough of the guy, possibly just because he was planning to set fixed limits to the office terms of higher party officials. Khrushchev's support would never recover from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was already hated for his impulsive and dictatorial style of rule, as he rarely consulted the rest of the Soviet administration before deciding things. Nikita ended up being thrown out. In the words of the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities, "If he had given any utterance to his thoughts, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: Before I came around, these things were settled with a bullet in the back of the head. I, and everyone after me will get to spend some time with their families on a nice dacha."
They also sent in the tanks to East Germany in 1953, when German workers struck for better working conditions, and to rectify the many broken promises of the USSR. Something similar occurred in Hungary in 1956. More on that below.
There was a power struggle during the two years following Stalin's death. Despite nominally being the overall leader of the country during this period, Malenkov commanded very little respect from his peers—especially after the execution of his main ally, Beria—leading to his responsibilities slowly being stripped away, before he was forced to resign altogether in early 1955, and Khrushchev (we'll just call him "Nikita" from now on) ended up in charge. One of the first things he did surprised the world.
It was 25 February 1956. The CPSU was meeting for its 20th Congress in a closed session. The "cult of personality" was being denounced, a veiled reference to Stalin. Then Nikita delivered what is known as "The Secret Speech". Four hours long, Stalin and his crimes were denounced by name. The speech apparently caused heart attacks and even suicides. Leaked to the Western press (possibly deliberately), the whole world got an idea of the extent of the brutality of the Stalinist regime.
Things were somewhat liberalised and in 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched. That year, Nikita started getting shoe slapped.
Shoe Slap 1: The Anti-Party Group
The Secret Speech and some failures in domestic policy turned the Politburo (in those years it was called the Presidium of the Central Committee) against Khrushchev. In June 1957, they finally made their move and put forward a vote to dismiss Khrushchev from his position as First Secretary and replace him with Nikolai Bulganin, who had previously succeeded Malenkov as premier. It should be noted that although the Stalinists Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich voted against Khrushchev, both the moderate reformer Malenkov and the previously great Khrushchev ally Dmitri Shepilov opposed him … as well as moderate bureaucrats who did not ideologically support either side, but they just didn't like Khrushchev on a personal level. The vote actually succeeded, with the Presidum voting 7–4 in favor of removing Khrushchev.However, Khrushchev had no intention of giving up his power so easily. He managed to persuade his rivals to undertake another vote at the Central Committee, which they were sure would just be a repeat of the first. What they didn't see coming was Khrushchev taking advantage of his relationship with Zhukov and the chairman of the KGB Serov, who flew military planes to the part of the Central Committee that was loyal to Khrushchev, and after a long debate, most of the Central Committee Presidium was called an anti-party group and accused of splitting.
Thus, Khrushchev remained in power, and quickly made sure that Molotov, Malenkov, and their co-conspirators were Reassigned to Antarctica. Thereafter, he also took over the role of premier on the implied reasoning that if the Anti-Party Group were happy for Bulganin to be both First Secretary and premier, naturally nobody should have any problem with him holding the same two positions. Khrushchev's handling of the incident solidified his position but also received a distinctly mixed reaction over his use of the military to resolve the situation, especially after he rewarded Zhukov for his loyalty by dismissing him from the government.
Shoe Slap 2: The UN General Assembly
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly has a meeting and all the world leaders make a speech. In 1960, Nikita was there and being pretty disruptive. He interrupted the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan twice, both in highly unorthodox ways:On 12 October, the debate was on a Soviet motion attacking colonialism. Lorenzo Sumulong, the Philippines' delegate, accused the USSR of double standards because of its domination of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev interrupted the speech with a point of order and denounced Sumulong as a toady of the United States. Accounts are conflicted regarding the actual use of the shoe. The 'traditional' source is that Khrushchev took off his shoe and banged it on his desk. Another source is that the shoes he was wearing were new and he had taken one off for comfort which he later banged on the table. Another source states his shoe had accidentally been removed when his foot popped out of it and the shoe was returned to him later, which is why it was on his desk. Some records indicate he did not bang his shoe on his desk at all but instead banged his fist on the desk so hard someone thought he was using his shoe which was already on the desk, and he may have mimed banging it without actually doing it. At any rate, there is no photograph or video of this incident, eyewitness reports are varied at best, and the fact that there were photographers who were watching the scene seem to indicate he did not actually use the shoe to bang his desk. (If you have seen a photo of Khrushchev holding a shoe, it is a popular fake.)
("We will bury you" was at another time and is somewhat ambiguous, in both languages, since Nikita said it in Russian, as to how and when the capitalists were supposed to die; the full transcript reveals he meant that the Soviet Union would simply outlive rotting capitalist states.)
Shoe Slap 3: No Way to Woo Virgin Lands
Seeing a lot of unused farmland in Kazakhstan, with Borat nowhere in sight, Nikita decided to move a load of ethnic Russians there and develop the land. This was stupid and disastrous, backed by science dodgier than a Del Boy product. The removal of the plants led to nothing holding the topsoil down. A dust bowl resulted in much of the area becoming unsuitable to grow anything.Other agricultural and administrative reforms did very little. On the bright side, Khruschev started a Union-wide housing project, with the aim of providing every family in USSR with an apartment free of charge. He roughly did. Yes, to the extent that all the old, shaggy five-storey apartment buildings are unanimously called "khruschoba", a portmanteau of "Khrushchev" and trushchoba ("Khrushchev's slum"). But we should not forget that these buildings are more than 60 years old, and they were designed to be demolished and houses of improved layout built in their place. And initially, Khrushchev's buildings were almost paradisiacal conditions, since the five-story apartment building was built in just a few weeks. Considering that by the early 50s millions of people lived in barracks, basements, or apartments with stove heating and wooden coverings, yes, Khrushchev houses with all the amenities, albeit small areas of the apartments themselves, were a pretty good offer. And, even though they all came out of the national budget, the people did not pay a kopeck for them. The administrative reforms in the industrial and agricultural field were full of holes and excess bravado that led to numerous catastrophes, but the industry itself grew enormously.
Let's not forget the other ecological disasters/problems the USSR suffered: ever hear of the Aral Sea? Well, in 1960, by all accounts it was quite lovely and the second-largest big inland sea-thing in the world. The Soviets wanted to turn Central Asia into some kind of cotton nexus (see above) and cotton needs lots of irrigation … anyway, they ended up diverting most of the water flowing into the Aral Sea for irrigation purposes. This didn't even work too well; a lot of these irrigation works were of poor quality. There was a lot of leakage and erosion. Inadequate drainage damaged the soil. The Soviets even knew, to some extent, the fact that they were going to get rid of the Aral Sea, but they thought it was justified; the Aral Sea was "nature's folly" and would evaporate anyway, so they might as well do some of nature's work. This had predictable consequences: dropping water levels, a lot of formerly coastal towns now kilometers away from the water … a real ecological disaster. Like, all that newly exposed lakebed … not much in the way of plants to anchor the soil or anything. So, dust-bowl type problems … that kind of thing.
Preceding Chernobyl, there was the Mayak disaster: an accident at a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in 1957. Dreary and nasty, but funny in a sick way. Let's just say that if you encounter a sign that tells you to roll up your windows while driving around Russia, you'd better do what it says.
Or how about Dzerzhinsk? Yes, named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and it still has that name. The one in Russia, of course, not the one in Poland or wherever. It was a center of the Soviet chemical industry and one of the Closed Cities, because a lot of chemical weapons-related work was done there. Today, it's one of the most badly polluted cities in the world and so toxic and nasty, it's perversely funny to read about. And unlike many badly polluted, toxic places, Dzerzhinsk is just as nasty as it looks. Much of the water there is contaminated with millions of times the maximum acceptable levels of various toxins, and there are big retention ponds full of toxic sludge.
Shoe Slap 4: Berlin
Setting up the Berlin Wall did not improve Nikita's reputation in the West.Shoe Slap 5: Cuba
We cover the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis in History of the Cold War (incompletely), but the results were humiliating for Nikita because he was perceived to have got nothing out of it. Ironically, he did get something out of it: The Americans agreed to remove their missiles from Turkey. But part of the agreement was that they wouldn't tell anyone about it.
Shoe Slap 6: The Hungarian Revolution
In 1956, a group of students began protesting the dictatorial, Marxist–Leninist rule of Stalin appointee Mátyás Rákosi. State security forces shot and killed many of the students while arresting and beating the others. These brutal, repressive measures sparked a nationwide revolt against Rákosi and, by extension, the USSR. Protestors turned into revolutionaries as they took up arms, seized the Hungarian Worker's Party (the main organ of government), and began lynching members of the much-hated State Sec force, the ÁVH. The revolutionaries put forth sixteen demands, the biggest of which called for free and fair elections, for Soviet withdrawal from Hungary, for investigations to be launched into Rákosi's misrule, and for a "realignment" of Hungary's relation to the Eastern Bloc, with the implication that they would leave the Warsaw Pact. The revolutionaries chose Imre Nagy to implement these reforms. As with the Prague Spring later down the line, most of the revolutionaries were leftists, and Nagy himself was a communist, so the intent of the revolution was not the overthrow of communism, but the establishment of democracy and regaining Hungarian sovereignty.At first. Khrushchev was open to negotiation and was willing to withdraw Soviet troops from Hungary. He was at least marginally sympathetic to the revolutionaries as he himself was an ambitious reformer, but he and Soviet leadership at large was terrified by populism and direct action, preferring a "top-down", state-guided approach to reform. However, Khrushchev leaned towards military intervention at the behest of Yuri Andropov, the Ambassador to Hungary at the time and a future leader of the USSR. He was also concerned that bourgeois interests could use democracy to destroy socialism in Hungary, and when Nagy withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, the Hungarian Revolution became a matter of national security in the eyes of Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders. As such, the decision was made to roll in the tanks.
The brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution had diplomatic ramifications for Khrushchev. When Stalin died in 1953, internal US State Department memos expressed optimism that the new leaders of the Soviet Union were more reasonable and less belligerent, and thus they could be worked with to promote better Soviet–American relations. Hungary changed that, with the State Department now convinced that Soviet foreign policy had stayed in rough stasis from Stalin's time, crushing the last great hope for normalized Soviet–American relations.
In 1964, the other Commies had had enough of the guy, possibly just because he was planning to set fixed limits to the office terms of higher party officials. Khrushchev's support would never recover from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was already hated for his impulsive and dictatorial style of rule, as he rarely consulted the rest of the Soviet administration before deciding things. Nikita ended up being thrown out. In the words of the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities, "If he had given any utterance to his thoughts, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: Before I came around, these things were settled with a bullet in the back of the head. I, and everyone after me will get to spend some time with their families on a nice dacha."
More Medals Than Results: Leonid Brezhnev
In 1964, Leonid Brezhnev took over Khrushchev's position as General Secretary, an office he would hold for 18 years, the longest of any leader bar Stalin. Brezhnev was a considerable reversal, of course, undoing many of Khrushchev's reforms and reducing de-Stalinization, although not repealing the provisions of the 1956 plenum, the 20th Congress, or the rehabilitation of victims of repression. Brezhnev in some ways even attempted to revive the cult of personality, and became the most highly decorated Soviet Head of State by the end of his tenure with dozens of medals. These were awarded by "helpful comrades" within the Soviet government, but it was often said that Brezhnev effectively awarded himself the medals, although the majority were actually awarded by foreign states. His award of the Order of Victory medal, the highest honor for military service in the USSR, was later revoked by the Soviet state in 1989. It's still unclear if Brezhnev himself pushed for these awards, or if it was the consensus of the Presidium and Central Committee that he should have them to boost his public image. In general, this is sometimes called a cult without a personality—the cult may have been, and was based not only on the dictatorship, but also on the sycophants from the Central Committee. After all, you don't need to praise Brezhnev, this is not Stalin's time; you couldn't even get demoted for this. Although this styling is reminiscent of a tinpot dictator, Brezhnev actually worked hard to rule by consensus, avoiding Khrushchev's impulsive decision-making and "rule by decree" in favor of working closely with the Central Committee to establish a unified platform. Brezhnev had almost certainly realized that sidelining the Central Committee is what primarily cost Khrushchev his job, and the same would happen to him if he continued to rule in the same vein as his predecessor. Brezhnev's was a rather dimmer personality than Stalin's or Khrushchev's, and his desire to have a more consensus-based rule also limited this "cult of personality" significantly.
The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the political, economic, and technological stagnation of the USSR, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station (Salyut), and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early '70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. note However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that nobody in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union this Domino effect of lying still plagues former USSR republics, particularly Russia, even today.
The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the said production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. Thus, every Lada ended up as The Alleged Car before it even left the factory floor, and people often had to wait at least three years to get one of these subpar cars. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation-state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality: "Let's make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did about national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by three successive and brutal invasions within just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Armynote ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, which is attempting to support the world's second largest military on a GDP comparable to Australia. Supporting this vast military–industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. Moreover, the state managed technological development in the Soviet Union as it did all other things, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically to sell more stuff, as it does under mixed capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the overemphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural USSR was forced to import grain. From America.
However, while Brezhnev's rule resulted in domestic stagnation, internationally he oversaw considerable gains for the USSR. Decolonization left Africa and Southeast Asia full of countries that were largely forced to choose between the Soviets or their former colonial overlords for support, and logically, many new nations chose the Soviets. The USSR gained considerable amounts of street cred among revolutionaries by supporting communist rebels in colonial territories such as Portuguese Africa (modern Angola and Mozambique) or the Viet Cong. Soviet involvement in the Vietnam War is explained in more detail its own page. Simultaneously while arming these rebels, Brezhnev also pursued a policy of détente with the West, and under his leadership, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed. However, not all his foreign policy decisions were victories. The Chinese continued to drift further from the Soviets as ideological disagreements mounted and the two would fight a small border skirmish in 1969. China would gradually drift towards the US during the rest of the Cold War, starting with President Richard Nixon's visit to the country. Of more pressing concern was the situation in Afghanistan, which is covered more on the History of the Cold War and The War on Terror pages, but in short: the Shah of Afghanistan was overthrown by his cousin and prime minister, who himself got couped by communists. The various communist groups in Afghanistan began to fracture and anti-communist rebellions began breaking out, aided by Pakistan's ISI and the American CIA, who covertly supplied them with weapons and funding. The Gulf States, too, would get involved in the whole shebang, quickly turning the anti-Communist uprisings into pro-Islamic puritanism uprisings instead. The USSR intervened both to take out the Communist government under Hafizullah Amin (who the Soviets considered a crazed liability) and replace them with something more pliable, and to defeat the rebels. Of course, the war ended terribly, but it would drag on long after Brezhnev's death and contribute significantly to the decline of the USSR.
Speaking of his death, Brezhnev kicked the can in 1982, but his health had been failing since 1975 and he'd become withdrawn from public and political life, leaving the Central Committee to its own devices for the most part. As with one of his contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, he had shown signs of mental decline by the end of his tenure as well. This was emblematic of a major problem facing the USSR, and one that would come to a head after Brezhnev's death: the leadership of the USSR was increasingly old. Brezhnev had been of the same generation as Khrushchev and most other Soviet political leaders, who had held on to power long past their prime as a sort of "Old Boys Club." Most of them were veterans of World War II, and quite a few were veterans of the Russian Civil War, as many a child soldier had fought between 1917 and 1921. This gave them political clout that allowed them to deny any ascension to higher office by the newer generations. This became known as a "gerontocracy"; rule by the old.
Brezhnev had also overseen the transition back to a more repressive regime than his predecessor. Domestically, Khrushchev's culturally liberal reforms were rolled back, as media became tightly controlled once more and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a Kangaroo Court, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a Psikhushka instead with a sham diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia," a label not used or recognized by any physician outside the Eastern Bloc.note Much like the "drapetomania" label used in Antebellum America to pathologize runaway slaves, the Soviets' justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to Marxism–Leninism.
In 1968, the conservative first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Antonín Novotný, reluctantly yielded power and the reformer who won the subsequent election to replace him, Alexander Dubček, announced a new “Action Programme.” It proposed the liberalization of socio-political and economic life, "socialism with a human face." Censorship had to be dismantled, the economy had to become less planned, and politics had to be absolutely multiparty. But economic liberalization had led to a decrease in the competitiveness of goods on the world market, and the abolition of censorship led to anti-Soviet and anti-Communist criticism in the media. Moreover, protests began calling for withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and the expulsion of all Russians (especially noteworthy is the incident with Valentina Belas, who was stripped naked, daubed with red paint and marched all over Prague because her name was on the list of supporters of the socialist system). The conservative, or rather, moderate reformist wing of the Central Committee Presidium, which voted for Novotný's removal from office six months ago, wrote an "invitation letter" to Brezhnev, saying that it did not actually control the country. Despite several high-level meetings, the Czechoslovak government and the party of Czechoslovakia really could not stop the anti-Soviet demonstrations.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania, Albania, and the GDR, however, the Germans sent a special group) invaded Czechoslovakia. It is important to note that the reason for this was not the reforms themselves, since after 1968 both Poland and Hungary would pursue an economic course far removed from the Soviet planned economy. The reason was the threat of Czechoslovakia's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, the threat of an anti-Soviet uprising. Thus, the "Brezhnev Doctrine" was actually formulated—carry out reforms only as long as you are loyal to the USSR and are in the Warsaw Pact. Some socialist bloc leaders, like Poland's Władysław Gomułka and Edward Gierek, as well as Hungary's János Kádár, actively carried them out in subsequent years. Indeed, other than the infamous Yuri Andropov taking his typical course of action and urging military intervention (as he had done with Hungary in 1956), there hadn't been any intense reaction to Dubček's Programme until communists found themselves actually assaulted, harassed, or even murdered, and the threat of Czechoslovakia leaving the Pact became a reality. Dubček was arrested and flown to Moscow, but Brezhnev decided to negotiate instead, making the big show of force ultimately just that: the invasion at the end of the "Prague Spring" was simply a reminder to the Czech and Slovak peoples of the might of the military titan next door. Dubček was put back in power but was forced to limit his reforms. A few months later, the moderate reformer Gustáv Husák became the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; the time of "normalization" under Husák is compared to the period of stagnation in the USSR. It was the final nail in the coffin for Soviet–Chinese relations, as Mao reacted harshly to the invasion because he viewed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" as the Soviets essentially decreeing who was and was not communist. This wasn't definitionally true, as the Soviets were fine with their fellow communist states experimenting economicallynote , but loyalty to the USSR proved paramount in receiving Soviet support (or not receiving a Soviet invasion ala Czechoslovakia) and such experimentation could not be allowed to imperil communist leadership within the Eastern Bloc, and especially not imperil their commitment to the USSR as military allies. The Soviets held onto Eastern Europe employing this "doctrine" for quite a long time, while they were offering the Eastern bloc goods at the lowest prices. In the developing world, this often took the form of cheap or even free weapons exports, since the military industry was the only thing the USSR had in abundance, and they preferred to reserve consumer goods for European communist states who were right on their borders. This even led some researchers to call it "reverse colonialism"—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) countries received goods at below-market prices and sold industrial goods to the USSR. Just like a colonial empire receives goods at below-market prices from colonies and sells industrial goods to these colonies. Some western communist parties, like Italy's, pretty much abandoned the Soviets completely, seeing the crushing of the Prague Spring as a betrayal of socialism and of just general human decency … while at the same time, up until 1990, they received money from Moscow, even despite their criticism of the CPSU.note And some, like the French Communist Party, although they condemned the invasion, did not sever ties with the USSR. Other nations in the Warsaw Pact were quick to criticize the Soviets, especially Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Despite all these faults, older Russians still fondly remember Brezhnev's leadership as a time when life in Russia was not miserable, when it was safe to walk down the streets at night, when everything was cheap, when the free education and medical care was good, when the people were kind and not corrupted by the later crapsackery … and when the fear of State Sec was already (mostly) gone. There were a lot of hilarious jokes about Leonid Brezhnev. He made a hobby of collecting them; he had several hard labor camps' worth, at least.
Eventually, Brezhnev died and was replaced with…
The Brezhnev Era is mostly known for the political, economic, and technological stagnation of the USSR, but it didn't start out that way. The Soviet space program continued to make incredible strides under Brezhnev's leadership, including launching the first space station (Salyut), and the Soviet economy did surprisingly well in the 1960s and early '70s. In fact, at the height of OPEC's oil embargo against the US in 1973, it wasn't uncommon to hear political talking heads already proclaiming that the Soviet Union would "win" the Cold War because of its economic prosperity relative to the US at the time, at least outside of the USA. note However, this would not last, as Brezhnev failed to address the mounting problems in the Soviet economy, mainly the fact that nobody in the USSR had any idea what their actual GDP was or how much was being produced. Sure, the Central Committee thought it knew said numbers, but the books they got were most certainly cooked. The centrally planned economy placed production quotas on industries, and failure to meet said quotas could result in being reassigned to a much shittier job in a much shittier town, so when inevitable production shortfalls occurred from one of the innumerable and incalculable variables that go into a national economy, it caused a cascading effect as plant managers lied about their production numbers to avoid a sacking, causing managers further up the industry chain to also experience shortfalls, which they then lied about. This meant the Central Committee was making economic plans using numbers that could be off by incredible margins. The longer this problem remained unaddressed, the worse it became, and it was arguably one of the biggest contributing factors to the Soviet Union's decline and fall. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union this Domino effect of lying still plagues former USSR republics, particularly Russia, even today.
The USSR also began to fall behind technologically when compared to the capitalist West. While the average Soviet citizen in the 60s had electronics and consumer goods that were, for the most part, on par with those manufactured in the West (not counting deluxe models/luxury goods), the 1970s saw sharp declines in quality as the said production shortfalls caused them to scrape by with whatever they had. Thus, every Lada ended up as The Alleged Car before it even left the factory floor, and people often had to wait at least three years to get one of these subpar cars. The same went for most consumer goods in the USSR, which were made to be manufactured cheaply and efficiently, with sacrifices made to quality and uniqueness. This is reflected in nearly every aspect of Soviet public life, especially the samey "Commie Block" apartment complexes that fill the former Soviet Union. This was partly justified, at least ideologically, by pointing out that places like America had a "head start" on industrialization, while the USSR had to transform Russia from draconian medieval kingdom into a modern nation-state, so the importance was on quantity rather than quality: "Let's make sure every Soviet citizen has a roof over their heads first before we can start talking about luxury apartments." Of course, the reality is that the Central Committee simply cared less about providing consumer goods than they did about national prestige, the military, and the heavy industries that supplied said military. The Soviet "siege mentality" incurred by three successive and brutal invasions within just a couple of decades made Soviet leadership dedicated to the idea of a massive standing army, so the Soviet Armynote ended up being unsustainably huge. This problem continues to Russia today, which is attempting to support the world's second largest military on a GDP comparable to Australia. Supporting this vast military–industrial complex meant diverting resources away from civilian purposes. Moreover, the state managed technological development in the Soviet Union as it did all other things, with official design bureaus, universities, and technical schools being given orders to design things, as opposed to the innovation happening organically to sell more stuff, as it does under mixed capitalism. While this is workable if the state has its priorities straight, it failed in the USSR, again because of the overemphasis on military tech over civilian developments. The Soviet economy actually went so wrong that the quite agricultural USSR was forced to import grain. From America.
However, while Brezhnev's rule resulted in domestic stagnation, internationally he oversaw considerable gains for the USSR. Decolonization left Africa and Southeast Asia full of countries that were largely forced to choose between the Soviets or their former colonial overlords for support, and logically, many new nations chose the Soviets. The USSR gained considerable amounts of street cred among revolutionaries by supporting communist rebels in colonial territories such as Portuguese Africa (modern Angola and Mozambique) or the Viet Cong. Soviet involvement in the Vietnam War is explained in more detail its own page. Simultaneously while arming these rebels, Brezhnev also pursued a policy of détente with the West, and under his leadership, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed. However, not all his foreign policy decisions were victories. The Chinese continued to drift further from the Soviets as ideological disagreements mounted and the two would fight a small border skirmish in 1969. China would gradually drift towards the US during the rest of the Cold War, starting with President Richard Nixon's visit to the country. Of more pressing concern was the situation in Afghanistan, which is covered more on the History of the Cold War and The War on Terror pages, but in short: the Shah of Afghanistan was overthrown by his cousin and prime minister, who himself got couped by communists. The various communist groups in Afghanistan began to fracture and anti-communist rebellions began breaking out, aided by Pakistan's ISI and the American CIA, who covertly supplied them with weapons and funding. The Gulf States, too, would get involved in the whole shebang, quickly turning the anti-Communist uprisings into pro-Islamic puritanism uprisings instead. The USSR intervened both to take out the Communist government under Hafizullah Amin (who the Soviets considered a crazed liability) and replace them with something more pliable, and to defeat the rebels. Of course, the war ended terribly, but it would drag on long after Brezhnev's death and contribute significantly to the decline of the USSR.
Speaking of his death, Brezhnev kicked the can in 1982, but his health had been failing since 1975 and he'd become withdrawn from public and political life, leaving the Central Committee to its own devices for the most part. As with one of his contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, he had shown signs of mental decline by the end of his tenure as well. This was emblematic of a major problem facing the USSR, and one that would come to a head after Brezhnev's death: the leadership of the USSR was increasingly old. Brezhnev had been of the same generation as Khrushchev and most other Soviet political leaders, who had held on to power long past their prime as a sort of "Old Boys Club." Most of them were veterans of World War II, and quite a few were veterans of the Russian Civil War, as many a child soldier had fought between 1917 and 1921. This gave them political clout that allowed them to deny any ascension to higher office by the newer generations. This became known as a "gerontocracy"; rule by the old.
Brezhnev had also overseen the transition back to a more repressive regime than his predecessor. Domestically, Khrushchev's culturally liberal reforms were rolled back, as media became tightly controlled once more and a light revival of Stalin-era repression policies was rolled out. If you protested the government, rather than sending you to a Siberian Gulag with only a vague pretext of some criminal act or a Kangaroo Court, the Brezhnev regime would simply prefer to declare you "mentally unfit" and put you in a Psikhushka instead with a sham diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia,"
a label not used or recognized by any physician outside the Eastern Bloc.note Much like the "drapetomania" label used in Antebellum America to pathologize runaway slaves, the Soviets' justification was that only an insane person would be opposed to Marxism–Leninism.In 1968, the conservative first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Antonín Novotný, reluctantly yielded power and the reformer who won the subsequent election to replace him, Alexander Dubček, announced a new “Action Programme.” It proposed the liberalization of socio-political and economic life, "socialism with a human face." Censorship had to be dismantled, the economy had to become less planned, and politics had to be absolutely multiparty. But economic liberalization had led to a decrease in the competitiveness of goods on the world market, and the abolition of censorship led to anti-Soviet and anti-Communist criticism in the media. Moreover, protests began calling for withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and the expulsion of all Russians (especially noteworthy is the incident with Valentina Belas, who was stripped naked, daubed with red paint and marched all over Prague because her name was on the list of supporters of the socialist system). The conservative, or rather, moderate reformist wing of the Central Committee Presidium, which voted for Novotný's removal from office six months ago, wrote an "invitation letter" to Brezhnev, saying that it did not actually control the country. Despite several high-level meetings, the Czechoslovak government and the party of Czechoslovakia really could not stop the anti-Soviet demonstrations.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the troops of the Warsaw Pact countries (except Romania, Albania, and the GDR, however, the Germans sent a special group) invaded Czechoslovakia. It is important to note that the reason for this was not the reforms themselves, since after 1968 both Poland and Hungary would pursue an economic course far removed from the Soviet planned economy. The reason was the threat of Czechoslovakia's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, the threat of an anti-Soviet uprising. Thus, the "Brezhnev Doctrine" was actually formulated—carry out reforms only as long as you are loyal to the USSR and are in the Warsaw Pact. Some socialist bloc leaders, like Poland's Władysław Gomułka and Edward Gierek, as well as Hungary's János Kádár, actively carried them out in subsequent years. Indeed, other than the infamous Yuri Andropov taking his typical course of action and urging military intervention (as he had done with Hungary in 1956), there hadn't been any intense reaction to Dubček's Programme until communists found themselves actually assaulted, harassed, or even murdered, and the threat of Czechoslovakia leaving the Pact became a reality. Dubček was arrested and flown to Moscow, but Brezhnev decided to negotiate instead, making the big show of force ultimately just that: the invasion at the end of the "Prague Spring" was simply a reminder to the Czech and Slovak peoples of the might of the military titan next door. Dubček was put back in power but was forced to limit his reforms. A few months later, the moderate reformer Gustáv Husák became the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; the time of "normalization" under Husák is compared to the period of stagnation in the USSR. It was the final nail in the coffin for Soviet–Chinese relations, as Mao reacted harshly to the invasion because he viewed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" as the Soviets essentially decreeing who was and was not communist. This wasn't definitionally true, as the Soviets were fine with their fellow communist states experimenting economicallynote , but loyalty to the USSR proved paramount in receiving Soviet support (or not receiving a Soviet invasion ala Czechoslovakia) and such experimentation could not be allowed to imperil communist leadership within the Eastern Bloc, and especially not imperil their commitment to the USSR as military allies. The Soviets held onto Eastern Europe employing this "doctrine" for quite a long time, while they were offering the Eastern bloc goods at the lowest prices. In the developing world, this often took the form of cheap or even free weapons exports, since the military industry was the only thing the USSR had in abundance, and they preferred to reserve consumer goods for European communist states who were right on their borders. This even led some researchers to call it "reverse colonialism"—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) countries received goods at below-market prices and sold industrial goods to the USSR. Just like a colonial empire receives goods at below-market prices from colonies and sells industrial goods to these colonies. Some western communist parties, like Italy's, pretty much abandoned the Soviets completely, seeing the crushing of the Prague Spring as a betrayal of socialism and of just general human decency … while at the same time, up until 1990, they received money from Moscow, even despite their criticism of the CPSU.note And some, like the French Communist Party, although they condemned the invasion, did not sever ties with the USSR. Other nations in the Warsaw Pact were quick to criticize the Soviets, especially Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Despite all these faults, older Russians still fondly remember Brezhnev's leadership as a time when life in Russia was not miserable, when it was safe to walk down the streets at night, when everything was cheap, when the free education and medical care was good, when the people were kind and not corrupted by the later crapsackery … and when the fear of State Sec was already (mostly) gone. There were a lot of hilarious jokes about Leonid Brezhnev. He made a hobby of collecting them; he had several hard labor camps' worth, at least.
Eventually, Brezhnev died and was replaced with…
Welcome to Our New … He's Dead: Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko
Yuri Andropov had been head of the KGB. The only notable things in his two-year rule were the KAL-007 incident, the US deployment of Pershing and Cruise Missiles and inviting an American girl who wrote a letter to him to visit the USSR.
…From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his stringent work ethics revival and other old-school moves that you could expect from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director. Under Andropov, the oppression of the Brezhnev Era (which he had largely masterminded, as the head of the KGB) grew even harsher. It was Andropov who had urged Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979, as well as constructing the "psychiatric healthcare" system that was used to imprison hundreds of dissidents.
Andropov began by his personal image and that of his party using two methods. First, he initiated an open fight against corruption. Especially noteworthy is the "Cotton Scandal", which vociferously investigated the facts of corruption in Uzbekistan, which was broadcast on the country's central television. This was supposed to improve the image of the General Secretary and the party. And on his orders, cheap vodka was released—since 1981, the cheapest vodka cost 5 rubles 30 kopecks, since 1983 it has cost 4 rubles 70 kopecks. While it's still more expensive than before 1981 (3 rubles 62 kopecks), people liked it and called this vodka "Andropovka".
He began the fight against absenteeism at work, strengthening labor discipline, and these measures brought little results, but he admitted that this did not change the very essence of the matter, did not solve the crisis of the Soviet economy. Under his leadership, the economic rights of enterprises were expanded in some ministries as part of an experiment. He also assembled a secret reform commission, which included future well-known reformers Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Vladimir Dolgikh. Under him, reformists like Yegor Ligachev, Leonid Abalkin, Vitaly Vorotnikov, and Viktor Chebrikov joined the country's top leadership, and Alexander Yakovlev returned from disgrace. Eighteen ministers and 37 first secretaries of the party's regional committees were replaced, in preparation for market-based economic reforms. He even wanted to promote Boris Yeltsin, but he died too early for that.
Andropov didn't live to see it, as he died too, in 1984.
Ill at the start, Andropov's successor Konstantin Chernenko lasted just 13 months. He was basically Andropov's designated heir and was confirmed as General Secretary with little fuss. After all, he was Andropov's right-hand man, and he had run the domestic affairs of the USSR while Andropov was in power, effectively taking up the role of Head of Government while Andropov was head of state (before them, the line between the two positions was blurry at best, and nonexistent under Khrushchev and Stalin).
Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader—only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office—actually had some effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, a truly egregious failure for a socialist country. He fired his Chief of Staff Nikolai Ogarkov, appointing Sergei Akhromeyev to solve the USSR's bloated military–industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of détente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between East and West Germany. He also reinstated the "Anti-Party Group"—Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Shepilov—in the party with seniority. In this regard, there was a joke that Chernenko wanted to appoint Molotov (who was 21 years older) as his successor. Ironically, Molotov outlived Chernenko by more than a year.
None of these policies really panned out, as Chernenko died early in his tenure, to the surprise of absolutely no one. The streak of insta-dead leaders, caused by lack of rotation in Politburo not only meant there were three transitions in less than three years, but also spawned its own set of jokes. No wonder the next Secretary was a refreshing change.
who wrote a letter to him to visit the USSR.…From the outside. From inside, the country looked in surprise at his stringent work ethics revival and other old-school moves that you could expect from a (seriously) dedicated, order-loving ex-KGB director. Under Andropov, the oppression of the Brezhnev Era (which he had largely masterminded, as the head of the KGB) grew even harsher. It was Andropov who had urged Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979, as well as constructing the "psychiatric healthcare" system that was used to imprison hundreds of dissidents.
Andropov began by his personal image and that of his party using two methods. First, he initiated an open fight against corruption. Especially noteworthy is the "Cotton Scandal", which vociferously investigated the facts of corruption in Uzbekistan, which was broadcast on the country's central television. This was supposed to improve the image of the General Secretary and the party. And on his orders, cheap vodka was released—since 1981, the cheapest vodka cost 5 rubles 30 kopecks, since 1983 it has cost 4 rubles 70 kopecks. While it's still more expensive than before 1981 (3 rubles 62 kopecks), people liked it and called this vodka "Andropovka".
He began the fight against absenteeism at work, strengthening labor discipline, and these measures brought little results, but he admitted that this did not change the very essence of the matter, did not solve the crisis of the Soviet economy. Under his leadership, the economic rights of enterprises were expanded in some ministries as part of an experiment. He also assembled a secret reform commission, which included future well-known reformers Mikhail Gorbachev, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Vladimir Dolgikh. Under him, reformists like Yegor Ligachev, Leonid Abalkin, Vitaly Vorotnikov, and Viktor Chebrikov joined the country's top leadership, and Alexander Yakovlev returned from disgrace. Eighteen ministers and 37 first secretaries of the party's regional committees were replaced, in preparation for market-based economic reforms. He even wanted to promote Boris Yeltsin, but he died too early for that.
Andropov didn't live to see it, as he died too, in 1984.
Ill at the start, Andropov's successor Konstantin Chernenko lasted just 13 months. He was basically Andropov's designated heir and was confirmed as General Secretary with little fuss. After all, he was Andropov's right-hand man, and he had run the domestic affairs of the USSR while Andropov was in power, effectively taking up the role of Head of Government while Andropov was head of state (before them, the line between the two positions was blurry at best, and nonexistent under Khrushchev and Stalin).
Chernenko, despite his illness and obvious shoe-in as a "transitional" leader—only chosen so the Old Heads had time to plan their retirements as the next generation of Soviets began to take office—actually had some effective policies. His domestic reforms tackled corruption, lack of education, and a lack of rights for organized labor, a truly egregious failure for a socialist country. He fired his Chief of Staff Nikolai Ogarkov, appointing Sergei Akhromeyev to solve the USSR's bloated military–industrial issue by redirecting production towards consumer goods. Internationally, he promoted a stance of détente, but it was rendered ineffectual as he maintained the Brezhnev Doctrine of holding Eastern Europe under a Soviet boot, even denying Erich Honecker's attempt to normalize relations between East and West Germany. He also reinstated the "Anti-Party Group"—Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Shepilov—in the party with seniority. In this regard, there was a joke that Chernenko wanted to appoint Molotov (who was 21 years older) as his successor. Ironically, Molotov outlived Chernenko by more than a year.
None of these policies really panned out, as Chernenko died early in his tenure, to the surprise of absolutely no one. The streak of insta-dead leaders, caused by lack of rotation in Politburo not only meant there were three transitions in less than three years, but also spawned its own set of jokes. No wonder the next Secretary was a refreshing change.
Killing the Patient by Trying to Save It, or Was He? Mikhail Gorbachev
"Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism."
Mikhail Gorbachev was the dude with the great big birthmark. He was a minor Soviet administrator before moving to Moscow and seeing a meteoric rise in the CPSU due to Andropov and Chernenko's reshuffling. Although privately a reformist, he made sure to mask his true intentions to avoid drawing the ire of conservative hardliners. He worked closely with Andropov despite being his ideological opposite in many ways, and he toed the party line, publicly supporting the invasion of Afghanistan despite being privately against it. It was a ruse, and a successful one, as he most assuredly would not have been given power if his true intentions were known, as conservative, Brezhnev-era politicians still dominated the CPSU.—Mikhail Gorbachev to other members of the Eastern Bloc, 1985
In 1980, Mikhail Gorbachev left the Central Committee for the Politburo, as the latter increasingly took over the former's role in Soviet politics. He was the youngest member of the Politburo at 49 years old. When Chernenko passed, the Soviet foreign minister and close Andropov ally, Andrei Gromyko, proposed appointing Gorbachev as General Secretary. Gorbachev expected it to be ugly, as his reformist intentions were now becoming publicly known, but to his surprise the Politburo unanimously confirmed him. They did this less out of a desire for reform than because they didn't want another elderly dedushka to take over and die right after assuming office.
Gorbachev's approach to leadership was a radical departure from past Soviet leaders. He was highly casual when interacting with other politicians and Soviet citizens, giving him a genial and down-to-earth character that only Khrushchev had come close to emulating. He forbade a cult of personality and encouraged those around him to speak freely, without fear of reprisal. He also forced many Soviet officials to resign, filling the ranks with some badly needed new blood while ridding him of the most stifling conservative ministers. With this, his power was secure, and he began to roll out a three-pronged reform program. The three keys to this program were uskorenie (Acceleration), perestroika (Restructuring), and glasnost (Openness).
Uskoreniye and Perestroika
"Restructuring" was a process of fixing the Soviet economy. The first part of the process was uskorenie, an ambitious five-year plan meant to accelerate Soviet industrial growth, hence the name. Gorbachev began borrowing elements of Lenin's New Economic Policy to stimulate the Soviet economy: workers were given greater say in the management of their industries, farmers would be able to sell a portion of their harvest at market, wages were increased across the board (which led to an increase in the excess of money over the volume of goods, that is, to an increase in the shortage), and he introduced quality control measures called gospriyomka. This led to a famous joke:At a restaurant
Finally, he made state quotas non-binding, meaning there was no longer a punishment for failing to meet them.Diner: Why are my meatballs cube-shaped?
Waiter: Perestroika!
Diner: And why are they undercooked?
Waiter: Uskorenie!
Diner: And why do they all have bites taken out of them?
Waiter: Gospriyomka!
Diner: And why are you telling me all this so brazenly?
Waiter: Glasnost!
What brought results was the anti-alcohol campaign that began in 1985. Such campaigns have taken place before, but ended in nothing, as previously they were limited to a decrease in vodka production and an increase in beer and wine production. At the suggestion of Ligachev and Solomentsev, harsh measures were taken in 1985: the production of all types of alcohol was sharply reduced, many alcohol shops were closed, and those that worked could sell alcohol only from 14:00 to 19:00, prices were raised. The cheapest vodka now cost 9 rubles and 10 kopecks. In this regard, a lot of jokes were written, which expressed the desire to return to the old, Brezhnev time. Of course, the anti-alcohol campaign has produced positive results: an increase in life expectancy, an increase in the birth rate, a reduction in crime and mortality. But at the same time, the consumption of surrogates increased, moonshine brewing spread (which created a shortage of sugar), many vineyards were cut down, and a huge hole was created in the budget. In general, this was considered a great failure by communists, liberals, and even the very leaders of this campaign, Ligachev and Mikhail Solomentsev.
Agricultural reform was his cornerstone, as the inefficiently organized agricultural sector was resulting in poor harvests and food shortages, and having to import grain from America to make up for it hurt Soviet prestige. To this end, he merged all the agricultural ministries into one, Agroprom, but the issues of collectivized agriculture were too deep for this change alone to correct, and overall his agrarian reforms underdelivered.
Glasnost
"Openness" was a policy of earning the public's trust by making more of the government's internal affairs public, loosening restrictions on media and the press, and encouraging more free and critical arts. Foreign radio and TV stations were no longer jammed, ending the policy of cultural isolation that had been enforced since Stalin took over. It also brought a wave of legal reform intended to turn the Soviet Kangaroo Court system into something that tried to uphold a concept of justice. Gorbachev was openly critical of the Soviet Union in his public addresses, creating an atmosphere of freedom and critical thought that had been absent in the Soviet Union up until now. Finally, he would move to establish a limited form of democracy with the Congress of the People's Deputies, which was a freely elected body that had the authority to choose the members of the Supreme Soviet, and the Soviet legislatures were given more power, dismantling the technocratic rule of the Politburo. For the first time in nearly 60 years, Soviet citizens could now vote and have a say in their government. However, the Soviet Union remained a one-party state, with the choices being for competing CPSU candidates and independents rather than a multi-party democracy.The first major test of this policy was Chernobyl. A reactor meltdown in Ukraine caused by an experiment that ignored dozens of safety rules, the initial response was the usual Soviet one—cover it up. Radioactive sheep in Wales (over 2,500 kilometres away!) meant that policy could not really work, and Gorbachev himself had been a victim of the cover-up, as his underlings had fed him misinformation that downplayed its seriousness. When he discovered this, he went on national television to give a speech acknowledging the disaster, using it to demonstrate the corruption and inefficiency in the Soviet system, and thus a need for reform.
Although Chernobyl was in the Ukrainian SSR, the wind blew most of the fallout north into the Byelorussian SSR. Belarus still has a lot of problems as a result.
Abroad, Gorbachev essentially ended the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan (although the process took four years), concluded two arms treaties and then announced the "Sinatra Doctrine" ("I did it my way"), allowing the Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own internal polices. The 1989 Hole in Flag Revolutions duly followed, with the beleaguered peoples of Eastern Europe finally seeing a way out from under the Bolshevik Boot. In Poland, the Catholic trade union Solidarity, which was founded in 1980 and made its first bid to free Poland the following year, has repeatedly paralyzed the communist regime with mass, direct action, causing them to be utterly dysfunctional throughout the 1980s. In 1989, with it clear that they'd get no support from Moscow this time, the communist regime agreed to Solidarity's demands for free elections, which the trade union handedly won the following year. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown after an ill-fated attempt to crush nationwide protests resulted in his own military turning on him. Hungary had a largely peaceful transition where the communist regime met with the opposition and gradually rolled out democratization and freedom of travel, resulting in citizens from other Bloc states (particularly East Germany) to use it as a transit hub to escape to the West. This resulted in mounting pressure on Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany, to implement similar liberal reforms. Gorbachev himself urged this course of action, but Honecker refused, instead ordering the military to massacre pro-democracy demonstrators in Leipzig. When the military refused, Honecker knew he had lost control, and he resigned. The East German government, in their haphazard attempt to regain control, accidentally gave orders to open travel with West Germany. They intended it to be tightly controlled by the state, but when Germans heard the news, they flocked to both sides of the Berlin Wall, and the government was too slow to act—not that the military had any intention of enforcing the decision. On the night of 9 November 1989, thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin, taking hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall: a symbolic end to the Eastern Bloc, if not its complete demise. Czechoslovakia followed a similar path as Poland, while the government of Bulgaria instituted top-down reforms itself to democratize the country (coincidentally, their communist party is the only one in the Eastern Bloc that survives in some form today while still enjoying high popularity, or high "popularity" depending on who you ask).
In the USSR itself, the republics started to break away. While most Soviet republics had no significant nationalist dissent, the Baltic and Caucasus states did. The former disliked the Soviet repression of their Catholic and Protestant faiths, didn't feel "in tune" with the Soviet people culturally, and had been fiercely independent before their absorption into the USSR in the 1930s. The latter were torn by ethnic strife, with the USSR not helping matters by openly favoring some groups over others. While the Eastern Europeans were free to choose their own destiny, Moscow had no intention of giving up Soviet territory, so they cracked down harshly when these regions attempted secession.
In relation to the West, Gorbachev attempted a policy of détente, but he found US President Ronald Reagan difficult to work with. Nonetheless, the two managed to hammer out arms control treaties that, when combined with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, resulted in a considerable warming of relations between the two countries. Gorbachev himself became quite popular among the US public, at least for a Soviet leader, and to this day he enjoys far more approval from the American public than the Russian one, basically for the exact same reason (he is seen as dismantling the USSR: a good thing in America but a bad thing in Russia). He re-established ties with China, then under the leadership of its own reformer Deng Xiaoping. This relationship continues into the present, with Russia and China being close economic and military partners (despite Sinophobia being entrenched in the ideology of modern Russia's far-right leadership). In the rest of the world, Gorbachev withdrew the USSR's commitment to establishing communism internationally, and many a Moscow-backed regime was toppled (sometimes at the behest of the CIA, sometimes organically). Despite the hawkish Reagan administration's attempts to portray the USSR as still an "evil empire," the days of Soviet interventionism were gone.
Gorbachev had an incredibly high level of domestic support (initially), as you'd imagine, but he had two sources of consternation: communist hardliners and liberal radicals. Gorbachev sidelined the former politically, but they gradually gained political clout, as the "My Way" policy had resulted in the Warsaw Pact's disintegration. Hardliners saw this as a national security threat, as the Pact had been established with the intent of keeping the West away from Soviet borders. The hardliners viewed World War III as inevitable, as the capitalists would not tolerate the existence of a socialist state, so they wanted to ensure that the fighting would happen anywhere but Russia this time. Fears of NATO encroachment drove a resurgence in support for the hardliners at the end of the 1980s, but ironically, the hardliners themselves would finally bring down the Soviet system. The liberals were broadly aligned with Boris Yeltsin, former Gorbachev protégé turned enemy and future president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin viewed Gorbachev's reforms as not being ambitious enough, and his supporters believed—sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately—that he had just announced his reforms for PR purposes and was not really executing them.
It should be noted that economic reforms have led to a deterioration in the economic situation. You would think that the more market elements there are, the less deficit there is in the economy? Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case, at least in the USSR. The reforms led to the fact that cooperatives massively took resources from state-owned enterprises, resold goods at a huge margin, and extended the rights of enterprises to transfer money from the non-cash circuit of the economy into cash, cashing out money that was supposed to go to the development of enterprises. In fact, it was theft, a prelude to the massive looting of The '90s. The deficit only increased many times, which, combined with the anti-alcohol policy, sharply lowered Gorbachev's approval ratings by the end of The '80s. This led to another bunch of jokes, such as this one:
The Minister of Agriculture comes to report to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Minister: Mikhail Sergeyevich, the trouble is, chickens are dying in the country.
Gorbachev: It's okay, draw a yellow circle in front of each chicken.
Two weeks later
Minister: Mikhail Sergeyevich, they are dying anyway.
Gorbachev: Put a green square in the yellow circle.
One week later
Minister: Mikhail Sergeyevich, they're dying, there's very little left.
Gorbachev: Write a red triangle in the green square.
One month later
Gorbachev: Why you don't come to me, how the chickens are?
Minister: All the chickens died.
Gorbachev: Oh, what a pity, I still have so many ideas!
Gorbachev, contrary to the beliefs of many a Russian or American, was a dedicated socialist, not a secret liberal. His reforms were intended to save the USSR, not to dismantle it. Unfortunately, this was not to be, because perestroika and glasnost unleashed a variety of nationalist forces that did not want to preserve the USSR in any form—although, as we will see later, the majority of the population wanted, if not to preserve the communist ideology, then at least to preserve a single state.
So Long and Tanks for the Communism: The August 1991 Coup Attempt and the End of the USSR
"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain."
The USSR had already started to dissolve in 1987, when mass demonstrations acknowledging Stalin's crimes in the Baltic SSRs went largely unopposed. The next four years would result in an unraveling of the USSR, which began as very gradual but finished very abruptly one day.Demonstrations continued in the Baltic throughout the late 80s, with the most notable being the "Chain of Freedom," when 2 million Baltic citizens locked arms and formed a chain spanning 370 miles across all three of the Baltic SSRs. Some of these protests were violently suppressed by Soviet police and soldiers, but others were not, demonstrating just how uneven and indecisive the rollout of glasnost had been.
Meanwhile, the Caucasus and Central Asia were being torn apart by ethnic conflicts and banditry. In the Azerbaijani SSR, the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join the Armenian SSR, as the Oblast had a lot of Armenian people. This was in defiance of Baku and Moscow, and it sparked an on-again off-again war between Armenia and Azerbaijan that continues to this day.
In 1990, elections were held across the USSR. The elections, being a relatively new thing for the USSR, were disorganized and left a lot up to the SSRs themselves, resulting in many including ballot measures to decide whether they should be independent. Most of the SSRs voted "nyet", but the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, and Moldova voted "da". This proved to be a lengthy process that would play out in Soviet courts and committee chambers over the next year, and in Moldova, a breakaway republic called Transnistria that was still loyal to the USSR rose up. It still exists today as an unrecognized nation, mired in Soviet imagery. Azerbaijan also had a popular uprising as well. This one prompted Soviet military intervention partly because of the strategic necessity of Baku's oil fields.
Other SSRs saw protests and uprisings as well. Ukraine saw significant ones, particularly in West Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Lviv, but eastern Ukraine largely remained loyal to the USSR. This is primarily because ethnic Russians had settled the east under Stalin's "Russification" policy. Ukraine did not initially vote for independence, however.
Russia itself saw dramatic change. With glasnost allowing the formation of non-communist organizations, new ones appeared, such as the nationalist group Pamyat. In the 1990 elections, Boris Yeltsin was elected to the Supreme Soviet. He had previously been First Secretary of the CPSU before resigning/being fired in 1987. Yeltsin gave no initial indication that he intended to liberalize Russia and thus end Soviet socialism, but his affiliation with groups like Pamyat made it clear that he was a communist in name only. He then got elected as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, the highest position in Russian (not Soviet!) government at the time. He rapidly began agitating for independence, and the Congress of the People's Deputies of the RSFSR declared Russia's independence in July 1990, but as with the other SSRs, the Soviet government stonewalled this.
Gorbachev decided to settle this with a nationwide vote in 1991, with the very Soviet nation on the line. The six that had already declared independence boycotted it, but in the remaining SSRs, the majority voted in favor of keeping the Soviet Union around. Meanwhile, the Soviet Army invaded Lithuania, causing protesters to start blockading streets. The unrest continued, and Gorbachev decided on a compromise that he believed could save the USSR: the New Union Treaty. It would have given the SSRs de facto independence, with them sharing only a common military and foreign policy. Like many a compromise before it, it only succeeded in pissing off both sides of the opposition. The hardliners viewed it as the end of the Soviet Union, while nationalists and liberals viewed it as "too little, too late." The hardliners made their move.
On 18 August 1991, Gorbachev was in his dacha, when he was taken prisoner by hardliners, who declared a "state of emergency" and proceeded to shut down anti-Communist newspapers. Military forces loyal to the plotters besieged the White House (no, not that one!), the seat of the Soviet Legislature. The people of Moscow revolted against this coup and blockaded the building. Much of the military refused to obey orders, and the coup simply fizzled out. Boris Yeltsin, whom the coup plotters tried to arrest, saw the time was right and stood on a tank, making inspiring speeches to the people of Moscow.
Gorbachev briefly returned to power as the head of a country that had ceased to exist for all practical purposes as its citizens realized it was beyond saving. He resigned from his leadership position in the Communist Party and ordered it dissolved. He tried to preserve what was left, but the jig was up: the Baltic states were already internationally recognized as sovereign nations, Ukraine had just declared independence, Armenia and Azerbaijan were at open war with each other, and even in Russia itself, Yeltsin had already usurped power, with the Russian SFSR taking control of Soviet assets and responsibilities. While it still existed on paper, Western news agencies could see where things were heading and had already begun to refer to the country as "the former Soviet Union."
On 8 December, the heads of the SSRs of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine drafted and signed a document declaring the USSR dissolved in a 24-hour period.
Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush were informed over the phone simultaneously. The Belavezha Accords formally dissolved the USSR, replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States. It ended up being more anemic than Gorbachev's New Union proposal, being little more than an economic bloc-cum-alliance.The rest of December was spent formally transitioning to this new political reality. By 10 December, the entirety of the USSR's territory was the Kremlin and Kazakhstan, and by 16 December, even Kazakhstan had left. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet flag was lowered in front of the Kremlin for (probably) the last time. The Soviet Union was officially finished. The Russian Federation had been born, with Yeltsin's first act as leader to declare Russia to be the successor state to the USSR, thus allowing it to assume the USSR's place on the UN Security Council and other global responsibilities. The Supreme Soviet of Russia, meanwhile, stuck around for a little while longer, ultimately being forcibly dissolved after they attempted a coup against Yeltsin in 1993 in response to his attempts to replace the 1978 Soviet Constitution. The coup ended with him shelling the Russian White House, pushing through the new constitution, and establishing the Federal Assembly as Russia's new legislative body, with the latter two remaining in place to this day. Though Christmas Day 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union, the 1993 coup marked the final death of its last vestiges.
It's an interesting question as to whether Gorbachev wanted to save communism—he would later declare he would have preferred it if Red October had not happened. In the end, his attempts to save it brought the system crashing down.
The More Things Change: The Legacy of the USSR and Putin's New Russia
As for the USSR, its legacy is still visible throughout Eastern Europe. The New Russia essentially lives in the shadow of the Union, with Soviet art, architecture, and infrastructure still dominating the country, as it does in the rest of the former USSR. Communism remains popular in the former USSR, with more Russians than not agreeing that the collapse of the Union was "a bad thing," at least in hindsight. After all, modern Russia is run practically the same way, with all the corruption, totalitarianism, and Byzantine backstabbing of the USSR with none of its social services nor notions of proletarian equality. The only "gain" Russia derived from the fall of the USSR was economic liberalization, which inarguably only hurt Russia. Yeltsin's market liberalization "shock therapy" did not mesh well with the centrally planned economy, as many Soviet industries proved unviable in a market system. The result was a horrific economic crash that left millions jobless and the Russian economy in the gutter. Most of industries would be bought up by the few people who had foreign capital,note almost all of whom were high-ranking ex-Soviet officials. They became the modern Russian oligarchs. The USSR's collapse also left millions of ex-Soviet employees without pay and social services, resulting in even more corruption as Soviet officials sold anything that wasn't nailed down to try and make ends meet, often for absurdly low prices. Furniture, books, machining equipment, natural resources, electronics, guns, tanks, helicopters, state secrets, and entire ships would be sold, and it still wasn't enough. It'd be two decades before the Russian economy stabilized near pre-dissolution levels.
Russia and its former subjects also disintegrated into violence, with The Mafiya filling the void left by the Soviet state. Violent crime and outright banditry became common, and the illegal drug trade boomed as Russians used booze, meth, or heroin to numb the pain of having their entire world disappear out from beneath them. Wars erupted: Moldova and Tajikistan broke out in civil war, Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight each other, and Chechnya seceded. The military was sent in, but the new Russian Armed Forces were in miserable shape. Like their Soviet predecessors, they were a poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly organized, poorly equipped conscript force whose main use was clogging up enemy tank treads with their bodies while the Soviet Air Force and artillery were relied on to do most of the killing. In the tight urban environment of Grozny, Russian soldiers fared badly against Chechen urban guerrilla tactics. Soldiers refused to leave their BMPs out of fear of getting shot, only to realize too late that the BMPs were too unarmoured to withstand RPG-7V grenades, causing many a Russian soldier to be cooked inside his APC like it was a giant flaming crockpot. The war ended indecisively, with the Chechens bloody but the Russians being forced to withdraw. In 2000, newly elected ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin made it his priority to retake Chechnya, and he did so by leveling Grozny with mass artillery bombardment.
Russia and many other ex-Soviets were also left with another crisis: demographic decline, as decades of abuse, mass murder, political repression, and economic mismanagement left many of the Soviet republics with a broken demographic structure due to a combination of poverty, crime, alcoholism, suicide and sheer despair over the future. In a phenomenon known as The Russian Cross, Russia and the other ex-Communist states saw death rates surpass birth rates for several years, which was only made worse due to the economic and social collapse of the 1990s, causing many to take advantage of relaxed travel and immigration restrictions to bail on the declining state.
Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to re-form the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and two decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was before Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given that not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted closer to Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno Karabakh War in 2021.note Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.note Furthermore, few former Soviet citizens remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous '80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite still being Russia's second largest party by vote share, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the CPRF has no chance of winning an election.note The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.
The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is its gobsmackingly large weapons market, which saw Kalashnikovs, BMPs, T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous staples of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to World War II continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The Cold War may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.
Russia also declassified a massive portion of the Soviet archives throughout the '90s. They've revealed a considerable amount of state secrets: the gulag system was exposed, as was the Katyn Massacre and many other Soviet crimes. They revealed the extent of their nuclear weapons program, and for the first time Americans realized just how wrong their assumptions were about Soviet nuclear capabilities (they had dramatically overestimated them). They also verified the long-standing rumor about the Soviet "Dead Hand" system: an automated system of Over-the-Horizon radar installations that can automatically transmit nuclear launch codes without human input. This system is still in use today. What, malfunction? No, Soviet technology is the most reliable in the world! However, many state secrets—such as the existence of Moscow's "Metro-2" or the purpose of the gigantic military installation built under Mount Yamantau—remain classified. Most of these documents remain untranslated.
Russia and its former subjects also disintegrated into violence, with The Mafiya filling the void left by the Soviet state. Violent crime and outright banditry became common, and the illegal drug trade boomed as Russians used booze, meth, or heroin to numb the pain of having their entire world disappear out from beneath them. Wars erupted: Moldova and Tajikistan broke out in civil war, Armenia and Azerbaijan continued to fight each other, and Chechnya seceded. The military was sent in, but the new Russian Armed Forces were in miserable shape. Like their Soviet predecessors, they were a poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly organized, poorly equipped conscript force whose main use was clogging up enemy tank treads with their bodies while the Soviet Air Force and artillery were relied on to do most of the killing. In the tight urban environment of Grozny, Russian soldiers fared badly against Chechen urban guerrilla tactics. Soldiers refused to leave their BMPs out of fear of getting shot, only to realize too late that the BMPs were too unarmoured to withstand RPG-7V grenades, causing many a Russian soldier to be cooked inside his APC like it was a giant flaming crockpot. The war ended indecisively, with the Chechens bloody but the Russians being forced to withdraw. In 2000, newly elected ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin made it his priority to retake Chechnya, and he did so by leveling Grozny with mass artillery bombardment.
Russia and many other ex-Soviets were also left with another crisis: demographic decline, as decades of abuse, mass murder, political repression, and economic mismanagement left many of the Soviet republics with a broken demographic structure due to a combination of poverty, crime, alcoholism, suicide and sheer despair over the future. In a phenomenon known as The Russian Cross, Russia and the other ex-Communist states saw death rates surpass birth rates for several years, which was only made worse due to the economic and social collapse of the 1990s, causing many to take advantage of relaxed travel and immigration restrictions to bail on the declining state.
Some have accused Vladimir Putin of wishing to re-form the USSR, but this is not likely to happen. Russia has gradually lost its influence over much of the former Soviet Union: The Baltic States already heavily disliked them for innumerable past crimes the Russians wrought on them, and two decades of misrule by a Kremlin coolie burned through whatever goodwill Ukraine had left for them, and that was before Russia invaded them. Turkmenistan has pursued a policy of "neutrality," which is not hard to enforce given that not even Russia is interested in them. Belarus and Kazakhstan are facing near annual protests, mostly in favor of joining "the West" and establishing liberal democracy, and Azerbaijan has drifted closer to Turkey. Armenia has also drifted away, as they felt the Russians had abandoned them during the Second Nagorno Karabakh War in 2021.note Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have made overtures towards the US, and the latter recently did away with the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one.note Furthermore, few former Soviet citizens remember the "good times" of the late 60s/early 70s. Most younger Russians only remember the disastrous '80s, if they are old enough to remember the USSR at all, so their view towards it tends to be apathetic at best or disdainful at worst. Despite still being Russia's second largest party by vote share, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is considered "cringe" by Russian youths, and they lag behind Putin's United Russia, which is so thoroughly dictatorial that the CPRF has no chance of winning an election.note The notion of reforming the Soviet Union grows more distant by the day, as the Union fades from memory and into history.
The most visible legacy of the USSR internationally, at least today, is its gobsmackingly large weapons market, which saw Kalashnikovs, BMPs, T-55s, and Hind helicopters be ubiquitous staples of every third world military. The Soviets were incredibly fond of handing out mass weapons shipments to fellow communists, something the capitalist bloc was way more hesitant to do (at least until you offered to buy them for a huge sum). As such, Soviet weaponry can be found across the globe, especially in the global south, where weapons dating back to World War II continue to play important roles in conflicts and insurgencies. The Cold War may be over, but Soviet weaponry is still killing Americans, and many others, the world over.
Russia also declassified a massive portion of the Soviet archives throughout the '90s. They've revealed a considerable amount of state secrets: the gulag system was exposed, as was the Katyn Massacre and many other Soviet crimes. They revealed the extent of their nuclear weapons program, and for the first time Americans realized just how wrong their assumptions were about Soviet nuclear capabilities (they had dramatically overestimated them). They also verified the long-standing rumor about the Soviet "Dead Hand" system: an automated system of Over-the-Horizon radar installations that can automatically transmit nuclear launch codes without human input. This system is still in use today. What, malfunction? No, Soviet technology is the most reliable in the world! However, many state secrets—such as the existence of Moscow's "Metro-2" or the purpose of the gigantic military installation built under Mount Yamantau—remain classified. Most of these documents remain untranslated.
See Glorious Mother Russia for how fiction often portrays this.
"The one who comes too late is punished by life."
—Mikhail Gorbachev
