Soviet Union

Soviet Union (Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, USSR) A state formally constituted in 1922, which emerged under the leadership of Lenin out of the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was the world's first and most powerful Communist state, the ideology of which was based on Marxism-Leninism. Despite the absence of a blueprint for his October Revolution or for how a Communist country could be achieved in practice, Lenin was quick to transform state, society, and the economy. Elections to the Constituent Assembly had made clear the limited popular support for the Bolsheviks, and so Lenin proceeded to outlaw his political opposition in early 1918. The hegemony of the Bolshevik Communist Party was realized through political commissars who ensured the loyalty of the Red Army, the personal union between the highest offices of party and state, and the brutal terror of loyal Cheka bands in the countryside.

The termination of World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk created a short breathing space which was needed to enable the new regime to prevail in the Russian Civil War. The war posed a great danger to it, and imposed severe hardships throughout the country. At the same time, Lenin had always considered the possibility of a civil war in response to a Communist revolution, and in some ways welcomed it, as it allowed him to take a firmer grip on the country. Indeed, landowners were expropriated almost immediately, while banks, commerce and industry were nationalized.

This rapid economic transformation compounded the enormous economic dislocations of the war, so that levels of industrial production in 1921 had been reduced to around 14 per cent of their 1913 levels. At the same time, government grain requisitioning not only deprived peasants of their produce, but also incriminated those who had refused to sell their grain to the government in the hope of better prices. These economic and social disturbances led to mass peasant uprisings and, more critical from Lenin's point of view, a rebellion of sailors at Kronstadt, who had previously been regarded as loyal and reliable. Lenin's response was the New Economic Policy (NEP), which reversed many of the earlier drastic economic measures, and quickly restored production to 1913 levels. With the Communist Party now much more firmly in control over most of former Tsarist Russia, the USSR was founded on 30 December 1922, as a federal union of national republics. (However, these republics enjoyed only nominal autonomy within the USSR.)

With Lenin's health deteriorating, the struggle for the succession began in earnest in 1923. It was a manifestation of the growing importance of the Communist Party relative to the state that the new party secretary, Stalin, was able to claim power for himself, though Trotsky (leader of the Red Army) and Zinoviev (leader of Comintern) appeared at the time to be more likely successors to Lenin. Henceforward, the First (or General) Secretary of the Communist Party would always be the effective leader of the state (though rarely its titular head). Stalin had three principal aims throughout his rule (Stalinism): to consolidate his own power, to advance Communism through the elimination of what he considered to be the bourgeoisie, and to extend Soviet power. He gradually outmanœuvred all his rivals within the top ranks of the party, while terror throughout the country brought his supporters to the local and regional power bases.

Once Stalin's power was sufficiently secure, he stopped the NEP and pushed for the advance of Communism in society and the economy. The first Five-Year Plan (1928–33) introduced large-scale investment in heavy industry, at the expense of agriculture and consumption. Meanwhile, in agriculture kulaks and other peasant proprietors were expropriated: by 1932, Stalin could claim to have collectivized 62 per cent of all farms, and by 1937 this figure had risen to over 90 per cent. The force and rapidity of these measures led to chaos and anarchy in vast parts of the country, with peasants enriching themselves at the expense of their neighbours, or destroying their cattle rather than let them come under the ownership of the state. A catastrophic famine ensued, in which almost eleven million people died. Thus, a socialist society and economy were achieved with some success, but only at extraordinary human cost.

To maintain his control over the state and party in these circumstances, Stalin extended his terror in the 1930s. After the murder of his last potential rival, Kirov, in 1934, Stalin reorganized the security forces and, with the help of the new NKVD, carried out the Great Purge. This enabled him to re-establish control over the country with an iron grip. Stalin's third goal, the extension of Soviet power, was mostly a product of the 1930s. The Hitler-Stalin Pact gave him a perfect opportunity to reclaim lands lost from 1917, and to extend Soviet territory even further. The eastern half of Poland came under Soviet control, while parts of Finland were annexed after the Winter War. In 1940, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were annexed.

When Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, three factors facilitated the rapid German advance for which the country paid so dearly. First, the Red Army had been significantly weakened by Stalin's purges, which had removed most of its experienced officers. Secondly, Stalin had assumed that Hitler would not risk his vast possessions in Europe in an attack on the USSR, so that he was completely unprepared for the attack when it occurred. Thirdly, it took Stalin as the supreme war leader some time to adjust to the tactical and military requirements of the war. Once an able command structure under Zhukov had been created and was allowed to function relatively freely, however, the Red Army was able to turn the tide at the battle of Stalingrad, as well as in the defence of Leningrad (formerly St Petersburg).

Like the Civil War twenty years earlier, World War II allowed the leadership to extend its power still further, as entire nationalities were uprooted and sent to Siberia and other remote areas, most notably the Chechens and the Volga Germans.

With around twenty million dead, and its formerly German-occupied areas in ruins, the USSR had suffered the greatest civilian and military losses of all victorious powers in World War II. Stalin was therefore able to claim large territorial gains for the USSR, whereby the Baltic States, parts of East Prussia, and substantial parts of Poland (as well as Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands in the east) were incorporated into the Soviet Union. In addition, Soviet troops occupied Eastern Europe and most of the Balkans, which Stalin now transformed into Soviet satellite states. Under leaders mostly trained in Moscow and unswervingly loyal to Stalin, and with ‘comradely’ assistance from the NKVD, Communist systems were established in these countries that sought to mirror the political and social set-up of the USSR. Ironically, it was in these years, when his power both within and outside the USSR was at its peak, that Stalin suffered from increasing paranoia. He started to demote almost all his aides, and increased his terror yet again, directing it against Jews and other perceived enemies. Just before another wave of purges, he died.

Stalin's death led to tremors throughout the Communist bloc, most notably the East German uprising on 17 June 1953. Within the USSR, a collective leadership was soon established between Khrushchev, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Bulganin. However, it was Khrushchev who quickly established his authority at the expense of the others. He secured control by a bold move at the XXth Party Congress in 1956, when he laid bare some of the atrocities of the Stalinist regime, in order to accelerate a process of ‘de-Stalinization’, which involved the reversal of Stalin's policies, and the dismissal from office of many of his protégés. Khrushchev tried hard to give agriculture a new impetus through a massive campaign to cultivate ‘virgin lands’ in Kazakhstan, with mixed results. His economic reforms included a greater emphasis on consumer goods, and a shift away of priorities from traditional industries (coal, steel, etc.) to modern industries (e.g. chemical industries). In foreign policy, he introduced a policy of careful détente with the USA, while at the same time his policy to advance Soviet influence wherever possible resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ultimately led to the brink of a nuclear war. Khrushchev's major problem was that, having denounced collective responsibility as well as autocratic Stalinism, he could never impose the harsh discipline into the state, party, and army that alone would have ensured his survival in the way that it had done for Stalin. This point was well understood by Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev upon his dismissal in 1964.

Brezhnev reintroduced collective responsibility within the Politburo, so as to share the responsibilities of, and to maximize general allegiance towards, the leadership. Brezhnev was careful not to alienate important groups within the party, and the same was true for the economy, where he led propaganda drives to improve efficiency, but never embarked on fundamental reform. Finally, he kept the military happy through promising to maintain the current levels of influence and allowing it to intervene in situations such as the Prague Spring which posed a direct challenge to its hegemony.

In fact, the Brezhnev era, which continued in essence under his short-lived successors Andropov and Chernenko until 1985, managed to produce stagnation disguised as stability. As Western technology developed in leaps and bounds, an isolated Soviet economy suffered from lack of know-how. As funds were increasingly used to subsidize foodstuffs and other articles on a day-to-day level, industrial plants suffered from wear and tear and from underinvestment. Furthermore, the economy was squeezed by exorbitant military spending, and found it increasingly difficult to compete with NATO (and specifically US) high-technology armament programmes such as SDI. Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, begun in 1979, exposed serious shortcomings in the military, while popular unrest in Poland could be contained only with difficulty, and then only superficially.

A new era began with the coming to power of Gorbachev in 1985. Despite the stagnation of the Brezhnev years, Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika, initiated from 1986, were by no means inevitable, as the new Soviet leader could well have tried to muddle through in the way of his predecessors. However, his policies soon developed a dynamic of their own, as reforms revealed further cracks that had been papered over, which necessitated further reforms, and so on. Perhaps the biggest strain that was exposed was the very composition of the USSR, whose constituent nationalities demanded increasing recognition of their own political and cultural rights. Ultimately, it became clear that the root problem of the Soviet Union was that of Communism itself. As Gorbachev's reforms produced some halfway-house between Communism and capitalism, the economy fared even worse, and discredited moderate reforms even more. The initiative was soon taken by Yeltsin, the increasingly popular head of the Russian Soviet Republic. By 1991, his authority eclipsed that of Gorbachev, especially after he saved the latter in the August coup. The collapse of central Soviet power was complete, with the resignation of Gorbachev on 25 December 1991. On 31 December, the USSR broke up into its constituent republics which were now independent: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan. Of its former Baltic republics, the independence of Lithuania had been recognized on 29 July 1991, while Estonia and Latvia had gained their independence on 21 August 1991.

Table 18. Leaders of the Soviet Union and Russia, 1917– 

Soviet Union
communist party leaders:
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin	1917–22
Joseph Stalin	1922–53
Nikita Khrushchev	1953–64
Leonid Brezhnev	1964–82
Yuri Andropov	1982–4
Konstantin Chernenko	1984–5
Mikhail Gorbachev	1985–91
Russia
presidents:
Boris Yeltsin	1991–2000
Vladimir Putin	2000–