It all began with German philosophers and social scientists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who, in 1848, wrote The Communist Manifesto for a London-based group of revolutionary socialists known as The Communist League. In the manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that capitalism, as it existed throughout nineteenth-century Europe, would eventually self-destruct and be replaced by a worker-led government wherein the workers would jointly own and benefit from all means of production. Communism, meaning the abolition of private ownership and where ‘each contributes and receives according to their abilities and needs’ was born. The Russian Revolution and Vladimir Lenin The concept of communism lay unproven until a member of the Russian Bolshevik revolutionary party, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, seized the opportunity to harness and coordinate the proletariat unrest in Russia against the aristocratic monarchist Russian government led by Tsar Nicholas II, a member of the ruling Romanov family. In 1917, Russia was already in turmoil and Lenin masterminded the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty causing Nicholas II first to abdicate and then assassinated. I think I’ve encountered most of this stuff in this book before, but it’s nice to work through a lot of it in this concisely formatted way. It’s basically pre-revolutionary context, revolution, Lenin, Stalin, WW2, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and collapse. I still struggle to organize this history in my head well in a way that I could hold a substantive conversation on it. But I find this history very interesting. Most of my remarks from here on will move unsystematically through the book, largely by way of excerpts. Khrushchev’s tenure spanned the tensest years of the Cold War. He instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 by installing nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida’s coast in Cuba. Deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and neighboring China and food shortages across the USSR eroded Khrushchev’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Communist party leadership. Members of his own political party removed Khrushchev from office in 1964. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Program

As we have a particular interest in visiting the countries and territories that once formed the USSR, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, we thought it would be beneficial to create a short history of how this vast empire came into being and what eventually led to its downfall. Of course, the topic is far more in-depth and complex than the 1,500-odd word narrative we have generated below to describe it but our aim was to keep this post short and provide just a general overview.

Political revolution in Poland in 1989 sparked other, mostly peaceful revolutions across Eastern European states and led to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. By the end of 1989, the USSR had come apart at the seams. One of the great virtues of such short histories is that they emphasise what specialists may regard as the bleeding obvious – but it is the obvious truths often buried in detail that bear restating.’ —Owen Matthews, The Spectator Soviet Russia arrived in the world accidentally and departed unexpectedly. More than a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union continues to fascinate us and influence global politics. BROWSE OUR BLOG POSTS FEATURING COUNTRIES OF THE FORMER USSR SEE MORE MONUMENTS & ARCHITECTURE FROM THE FORMER SOVIET UNION Before he became the eighth and final General Secretary, Gorbachev was a keen supporter of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation program and was heavily influenced by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and subsequent attempts to cover up what had happened. He also felt that Russia and the whole USSR was in desperate need of social reform and, in 1985 when he became General Secretary, he implemented his two famous programs of perestroika and glasnost. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, was aimed at reforming the policies and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to become more like the western free-market system based on democratic elections and an embracing, rather than repression, of different cultures and religions. Glasnost, meaning openness and transparency, was a program introduced at all levels of government aimed at encouraging constructive criticism of local and national programs, something that would have never happened under Stalin’s rule.

In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern bloc countries under a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact, setting off the Cold War. Leonid Brezhnev reversed many of Khrushchev’s liberalisation policies and throughout his eighteen years in power, Brezhnev reverted to the Stalinist model using repression and fear to implement his agricultural and military policies, and did very little to de-escalate the Cold War with Europe and the USA despite his support of détente. Although Brezhnev built up the USSR’s military might, including nuclear weapons, his agricultural and other manufacturing policies at home failed and the economy of Russia stagnated. Meanwhile, Gorbachev’s reforms were slow to bear fruit and did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it. A loosening of controls over the Soviet people emboldened independence movements in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. This was not surprising. If you look at the history of, for example, the ‘stans’ – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, you will see that each area was originally annexed by Russia at various times in the nineteenth century and thus became part of the Russian Empire. When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the ‘stans’ were automatically included in the conversion to a communist soviet state and there had always been a resentment to Russian rule and, in particular, Russification, a process whereby a non-Russian community gave up its culture and language in favour of the Russian one. When Gorbachev announced his perestroika/glasnost programs, each of these satellite states saw it as an opportunity to regain their national independence and began to reform along national lines. On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.

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Stalin implemented a series of Five-Year Plans to spur economic growth and transformation in the Soviet Union. The first Five-Year Plan focused on collectivizing agriculture and rapid industrialization. Subsequent Five-Year Plans focused on the production of armaments and military build-up.

The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Khrushchev And De-Stalinization In a period known as the Red Terror, Bolshevik secret police—known as Cheka—carried out a campaign of mass executions against supporters of the czarist regime and against Russia’s upper classes. Millions died during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. For many years the USSR denied the Great Famine, keeping secret the results of a 1937 census that would have revealed the extent of loss. At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.

Why not also add these?

U.S. President John F. Kennedy responded to Gagarin’s feat by making the bold claim that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The U.S. succeeded—on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. Mikhail Gorbachev