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User:Eco
I consider myself dedicated to examining all aspects of history and in the process, keeping historians honest. Although I have opinions -- just like everyone -- I do my best to keep them from leaking through into my historical research.
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History of the Soviet Union (copy of current version)
Bolshevik Revolution
The first leader of the Soviet Union was Vladimir Lenin, who led the communists (then called Bolsheviks) to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The new government did not get an easy start. With the newly formed Red Army in disarray, the Soviet Union had to pull out of World War I. The peace treaty with Germany, the so-called Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, made the union hand over most of the area of the Ukraine and Belarus. The opponents of communism within and without the union did not accept the new government, and this led to all-out civil war, which lasted until 1922. The Soviet Union was officially established on November 30, 1922.
After the revolution, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) quickly became the only legal political party. The governing of the country was, in theory, to be done by local and regional democratically elected councils (soviets). In practice, however, each level of government was controlled by its corresponding party group. The highest legislative body was the Supreme Soviet. The highest executive body was the Politburo. (More about the political organization of the USSR can be found on Organization of the Communist Party of the USSR.)
In December 1917, the Cheka was founded as the Bolshevik's first internal security force. Later it changed names to GPU, OGPU, MVD, NKVD and finally KGB. These "secret police" were responsible for finding anyone viewed by the party as an opportunist, counter-revolutionary, drunk, or "parasite" and expelling them from the party or bringing them to trial for counter-revolutionary activities.
In the winter of 1922, at the end of the civil war, the sailors from the naval base on Kronstadt Island, who had been stalwart supporters of the Bolsheviks during the civil war revolted against the new regime. Commanded by Leon Trotsky, the Red Army crossed the ice over the frozen Baltic Sea and quickly crushed the Kronstadt Rebellion. However, the repression of the Kronstadt sailors made Lenin and some of the Bolshevik leadership realize it was time for a "strategic retreat" from it's hard-line methods.
One attempt at this was the establishment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for a limited market to exist. Small private businesses were allowed to grow and restrictions on political activity were somewhat eased. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this period was the conspicuous consumption by the few who managed to become wealthy. At the time, many in the west saw this as the beginning of the end of the "red menace"
Stalin Era
After Lenin died in 1924, a fierce political battle took place in which Joseph Stalin came out on top. Stalin had a superior reputation as a revolutionary, "devoted Bolshevik," and Lenin's "right hand man." As a result, he was able to outmaneuver several political opponents, such as Leon Trotsky, and achieve a political victory. In 1929, Stalin ended the NEP and the entire economy was brought under state control in order to institute a number of Socialist policies, specifically collective farming and five-year plans, which called for ambitious industrialization. While the results of Soviet industrialization proved astonishing in the eyes of many, the results of collectivization proved much more varried. Successful in some areas, disastrous in others. Some argue it even produced major famines in 1932-331, particularly in the Ukraine. Collectivization led to a drop in the already low productivity of Russian farming, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940, or allowing for the further disasters of World War II, 1950.2 These statistics, and the actual existence of these famines is debated though. Some argue that the famines were generally a hoax. That collectivization was not responsible for millions of deaths and the actual amount of people who died of starvation was much lower and due to other causes.3 The 1932 dust bowl crisis which occurred not only in the USA, but also in India and the USSR, is commonly cited as one explanation.
In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first Five-Year Plan achieved amazing results. Russia, an inert sleeping giant before 1914, now became industrialized at an unbelievable speed, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the nineteenth century and Japan's earlier in the twentieth.
With industrialization came social advancement. Most observers in the 1920s credited the Stalin regime with abandoning the tsarist policy of persecuting national minorities in favor of a policy of tolerance toward the more than two hundred minority groups in the Soviet Union. Another feature of the Stalin regime that received praise was the extension of medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily decreased.
From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to prison and labor camps, and 0.8 million sentenced to expatriation. See Gulag. Much like with the famines, the evidence supporting these statistics4 is disputed.
"The Great Patriotic War"
The Second World War (known throughout the former USSR as the Great Patriotic War) caught the Soviet military unprepared. A widely-held belief is that this was caused by a large number of the senior officers being sent to prison in the "Great Purges" of 1936-1938. To secure Soviet influence over Eastern Europe and buy some time, Stalin arranged the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact with Germany on August 23, 1939. A secret addition to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania to Germany. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, USSR followed on September 17th. On November 30th, USSR attacked Finland in what is called the Winter War.
On June 22nd 1941, however, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union (see Operation Barbarossa). It is said that Stalin at first refused to believe Germany had broken the treaty. However, new evidence shows Stalin held meetings with a variety of senior Soviet government and military figures, including Molotov (People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Timoshenko[?] (People's Commissar for Defense), Zhukov (Chief of Staff of the Red Army), Kuznetsov (Commander of both North Caucasus and Baltic Military Districts), and Shaposhnikov[?] (Deputy People's Commissar for Defense). All in all, on the very first day of the attack, Stalin held meetings with over 15 individual members of the Soviet government and military apparatus.5
It is claimed by some that Germany received notice of a planned attack by the Soviet Union. Some Russian military men as well have recently stated that Stalin's Red Army was in offensive position and ready to strike Germany. This, however, contradicts a number of other theories.
The Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, but were stopped by an early winter and a Soviet counter-offensive. At the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, after losing an estimated 1 million men in the bloodiest battle in history, the Red Army was able to regain the initiative of the war. The Soviet forces were soon able to regain their lost territory and push their over-stretched enemy back to Germany itself.
From the end of 1944 to 1949 large sections of eastern Germany came under the Soviet Union's occupation and on May 2nd 1945, the capital city Berlin was taken, while over fifteen million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called GDR German Democratic Republic) and western Germany (later called FRG Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech etc. were then moved onto German land.
The Soviets bore the brunt of World War II and the West did not open up a second front in Europe until D-Day. Approximately 21 million Soviets, among them 7 million civilians, were killed in "Operation Barbarossa", the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis. Many feel that since the Slavs were considered "sub-human", this was ethnically targeted mass murder. However, the retreating Soviet army was ordered to pursue a 'scorched earth' policy whereby retreating Soviet troops were ordered to destroy Russian civilian infrastructure and food supplies so that the German troops could not use them.
The Cold War
Before the Cold War, longstanding disparities in the productive capacities, developmental levels, and geopolitical strength existed between East and West. The "East", in many respects, had been behind the "West" for centuries. As a result, reciprocating Western military build-ups during the Cold War placed an uneven burden on the Soviet economy, forcing them allocate a disproportionately large share of their resources to the defense sector.
Later Soviet leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev consolidated their base of power through the use of economic reforms to the Soviet economy, though some say they still served more as functionaries to the party, than dictators. They were also responsible for the many cases of Soviet imperialism which followed. For example, during Brezhnev's time in office, the ill-fated Soviet invasion to support the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was initiated, in December 1979.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union in 1985 he responded to the breakdown of Détente[?] and American president Ronald Reagan's military build-up. The Soviets simply could not afford to outspend the West. Gorbachev attempted to preserve the collapsing Communist regime by reducing tensions with the United States and lessening the extent of political persecution, but without abandoning the core Communist tenet of centralized bureaucratic control of the economy. His two key policies were Glasnost -openness, and Perestroika -restructuring. These attempts failed, and the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred in 1991.
From 1945 until the collapse, The Soviet Union fought a Cold War with the USA. The USSR organized its satellite communist countries in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania) in the Warsaw pact to counter the perceived threat from the Western European countries, organized in the NATO pact. The USSR also supported a number of pro-communist / anti-USA regimes around the world, most notably Cuba, Libya, and Syria.
Related topics Soviet Union -- Leaders of the USSR -- Communism -- Socialism -- World War I -- Russian Civil War -- World War II -- The Cold War -- Red Army
References
1Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Extremes, 1994
2Elias H. Tuma: Twenty-six Centuries of Agrarian Reform: A Comparative Analysis, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965
3 In Search of a SOVIET HOLOCAUST: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/7213/sov-hol) by Jeff Coplon, Originally published in the Village Voice (New York City), January 12, 1988.
4Robert Conquest: The Great Terror, 1968
5(Steven J. Main: ibid.; 1). 837, citing '1zvestiya 'TsK KPSS', Volume 6, 1990; p. 216-22).
- Russia News, News Searches, and Reference. (http://www.HavenWorks.com/world/russia/)
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